Other forms: tempered, tempering, tempers
Somebody's temper is how quickly they become angry. A quick temper, lose your temper, keep your temper.
Used alone, a temper usually means a bad one: he has a temper. The fixed phrases carry the word: lose your temper, keep your temper, in a temper, tempers frayed. The verb means something quite different — to temper is to moderate: tempered by experience, temper justice with mercy. In metalwork, tempering steel is heating and cooling it to the right hardness, which is where the moderating sense comes from.
1nountemperHow easily somebody becomes angry.
“He has a temper and everybody in the office knows it.”
2verbmoderateTo moderate something, making it less severe.
“Her enthusiasm was tempered by about a decade of experience.”
3verbhardenTo harden metal by heating and cooling it.
“The blade is tempered twice before it is sharpened.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
temper is a state of mind, or a moderating.
TEMPer → your TEMPerature, and how near boiling it is
The same idea as temperature: how hot you are running, and how far you are from the point where it all boils over.
hooks ontotemperature
Latin temperare meant to mix in the right proportion. Medieval medicine held that character came from the mixture of four humours, so your temper was literally your blend — and temperature, temperate and temperament are all the same idea of proportion.
Old English
ġetemprian
Middle English
temperen
English, today
temper
Built from
From Middle English temperen, tempren, from Old English ġetemprian, temprian, borrowed from Latin temperō (“transitive to divide or proportion duly, to moderate, to regulate; intransitive to be moderate, temperate”), from tempus (“time, fit season”). Compare also French tempérer. a doublet of tamper. See temporal.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA