Hottest

How to spell hottest

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hottest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hottest mean?

1. adjectiveHaving the highest temperature, or being the most intense, popular, or fashionable, compared with others.

Hottest in a sentence

• July was the hottest month the city had ever recorded.

• The new phone was the hottest gadget in every electronics shop that season.

Where does hottest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the superlative form of the adjective 'hot', which descends from the Old English word 'hat', meaning warm, burning, or fiery. That word goes back to a common Germanic root shared with the Dutch 'heet' and the German 'heiss', all carrying the same idea of high temperature. The superlative ending '-est' is also native English inheritance, used since Anglo-Saxon times to mark the highest degree of a quality. The single short vowel in 'hot' is what triggers the doubled consonant before the suffix, giving 'hottest' rather than 'hotest'; this consonant-doubling rule applies to many short one-syllable adjectives. Over the centuries 'hot' broadened far beyond temperature to mean fashionable, popular, or intensely competitive, and the superlative followed it into all those senses.

How the word is built

• hot (from Old English hat: warm, fiery)
• -t- (doubled consonant)
• -est (superlative suffix)