Other forms: temperatures
Temperature is how hot or cold something is, put into numbers. Twenty degrees in the room, minus two outside, the oven at 180.
You take a temperature with a thermometer, and in British English 'he has a temperature' means a fever — his is higher than it should be. Temperatures rise, fall, drop and soar. Room temperature is the temperature of a room nobody has heated, which is what the wine and the butter are supposed to be. The word stretches to feelings too: the temperature of a meeting rises the moment somebody raises their voice. Say it in three quick beats, TEM-pruh-cher, with the middle of the word swallowed.
1nountemperatureHow hot or cold something is, measured in degrees.
“The temperature dropped below freezing overnight.”
synonyms: heat
2nounbodyBody heat higher than normal, as a sign of illness.
“She has a temperature, so she is staying home from school.”
3nounlevelThe level of tension or excitement in a situation.
“His apology brought the temperature of the argument right down.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
temperature is a measurement.
Temperature comes from Latin temperātūra, built on tempero, 'to temper' — to mix things in the right proportion. For centuries the word described the balance of hot, cold, wet and dry inside a body rather than a number on a scale. The degrees arrived later; the idea of a right mixture came first.
Latin
temperātūra
English, today
temperature
Built from
Latin temperātūra (cf. also French température), from the past participle stem of tempero (“to temper”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA