Warm
adjectiveHaving or giving off a moderate degree of heat; also describing friendly, affectionate feeling.
How to spell warm
4 letters · 1 syllable
How to pronounce warm
What does warm mean?
- adjectiveHaving or giving off a moderate degree of heat; also describing friendly, affectionate feeling.
- verbTo make or become moderately hot.
Warm in a sentence
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adjective
The cabin stayed warm all night thanks to the wood stove.
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verb
Let the engine warm for a minute before driving off.
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adjective
The new neighbours gave us a warm welcome.
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verb
He likes to warm the leftovers in the oven rather than the microwave.
Where does warm come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
The word comes from the Old English wearm, meaning 'moderately hot' or 'having heat'. It belongs to a broad family of Germanic words, with close cousins in Dutch warm and German warm, all tracing back to an ancient root meaning simply 'to be hot'. Scholars link it to the same prehistoric source that gave Latin formus 'warm' and the Sanskrit gharma 'heat', showing how widely the idea travelled across the early Indo-European languages. From its literal sense of physical heat, English speakers soon extended it to describe friendly, affectionate feeling, so a 'warm welcome' has nothing to do with temperature. The spelling has stayed remarkably steady for over a thousand years, and its trap for modern writers is purely sound: the 'ar' is pronounced like 'or', which can tempt people to misspell it.
How the word is built
- warm (from Old English wearm: moderately hot)
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