Lukewarm

How to spell lukewarm

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce lukewarm

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does lukewarm mean?

1. adjectiveOnly moderately warm; neither hot nor properly cold.
2. adjectiveShowing little interest, enthusiasm, or commitment.

Lukewarm in a sentence

• The coffee had gone lukewarm by the time she returned to her desk.

• The proposal received a lukewarm response from the board.

• He ran the bath but the water came out lukewarm and unpleasant.

• Her lukewarm support for the project worried the campaign managers.

Where does lukewarm come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is essentially a doubling-up of two ways of saying 'mildly warm'. The first part, 'luke', has nothing to do with the name Luke; it descends from the Middle English 'lew' or 'leuk', meaning tepid, which traces back to the Old English 'hleow', meaning warm, sheltered, or sunny. That older element has cousins in Dutch 'lauw' and German 'lau', both meaning tepid. Because 'luke' on its own had stopped being understood as a word for warmth by the late medieval period, English speakers reinforced it with the plain word 'warm', producing a mild redundancy that literally says 'warm-warm'. The combined form is recorded from around the 1300s, and the figurative sense of showing little enthusiasm followed naturally from the idea of a temperature that is neither hot nor cold. The spelling trap is that 'luke' looks like a proper name, so writers must remember it is a single solid word with no hyphen and no extra letters.

How the word is built

• luke- (from Middle English lew/leuk: tepid)
• warm (familiar word for moderate heat)