Heats

How to spell heats

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce heats

What does heats mean?

1. verbMakes something hot or becomes hot, in the third person singular present tense.
2. nounPreliminary rounds of a race or contest from which finalists are selected.

Heats in a sentence

• verb

  The new boiler heats the whole house within minutes.

• noun

  The fastest swimmers from the morning heats advanced to the final.

• verb

  This pan heats unevenly on the old stove.

• noun

  Officials scheduled the sprint heats before the lunch break.

Where does heats come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word heat comes from the Old English hætu, meaning warmth or hotness, which was itself built on the same Germanic root that gave us the adjective hot. The earliest sense was simply the quality of being warm, whether of fire, the body, or the weather, and from this the verb sense (to make or become hot) developed naturally. By the seventeenth century heat had also taken on the figurative sense of intensity or excitement, as in the heat of an argument, and from the world of sport it came to mean a single round of a race or contest, since runners would warm up and compete in preliminary rounds. The plural and verb form heats simply adds the -s ending used for plural nouns and third-person singular present-tense verbs. Because the spelling is short and regular, the only real care needed is keeping the long vowel spelled with ea rather than ee.

How the word is built

• heat (Old English hætu: warmth)
• -s (plural noun / third-person singular verb ending)