Hotspot

How to spell hotspot

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hotspot

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hotspot mean?

1. nounA location or device that provides wireless internet access to nearby phones and computers.
2. nounA place of intense activity, danger, or concentrated interest.

Hotspot in a sentence

• The cafe offers a free hotspot for paying customers.

• The city centre became a hotspot for petty crime over the summer.

• She turned her phone into a hotspot so the family could work on the train.

• This coastline is a hotspot for rare migrating birds.

Where does hotspot come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a modern compound built from two very old native English elements. 'Hot' descends from the Old English 'hat', meaning warm or burning, and by extension came to mean intense, active, or popular. 'Spot' arrived in Middle English meaning a small mark or stain, probably from a Germanic source related to Middle Dutch 'spotte', and it later broadened to mean a particular place or location. Joined together in the twentieth century, 'hotspot' first described a place of danger or intense activity, such as a military trouble spot or a fashionable nightspot. With the spread of wireless internet from the late 1990s onwards, the word gained its now-dominant technology sense: a physical area, or a phone configured to share its connection, where you can get online. Because both parts are familiar everyday words, the only real spelling question is whether to write it as one word, which is now standard.

How the word is built

• hot (intense, active)
• spot (place, location)