Heat

How to spell heat

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heat

What does heat mean?

1. nounThe quality or state of being hot; warmth or high temperature.
2. verbTo make something hot or warm, or to become hot.
3. nounA preliminary round of a race or contest that decides who advances.

Heat in a sentence

• noun

  The heat from the oven filled the small kitchen.

• verb

  Please heat the soup gently on the stove.

• noun

  She won her heat and qualified for the final.

• noun

  Workers struggled in the afternoon heat on the building site.

• verb

  We heat the spare room before guests arrive.

• noun

  The swimmers lined up for the first heat of the morning.

Where does heat come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heat descends from the Old English noun hǣtu, meaning 'warmth' or 'hotness', which was formed directly from the same Germanic root that gives us the adjective 'hot'. That root traces back to a Proto-Germanic word reconstructed as haitiz, which carried the basic idea of being hot or burning, and it has close cousins across the Germanic languages, such as the Dutch hitte and the German Hitze. Over the centuries the vowel and spelling settled into the modern 'ea' form, a digraph that English often uses for this long 'ee' sound, as in 'meat' and 'beat'. The meaning has stayed remarkably stable, always centred on warmth and high temperature, while picking up useful extensions over time: the sense of intense feeling or anger, and the sporting sense of a preliminary race. Because the word is short, ancient, and everyday, its spelling rarely troubles anyone, the only point to note being that the 'ea' is pronounced as a single long vowel.

How the word is built

• heat (from Old English hǣtu: warmth, hotness), a noun directly tied to the adjective 'hot'