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By Liz Walter
There are a lot of words for talking about temperature in English. Many of them describe particular types of thing. For example, some adjectives can be used to describe the weather but not food or people. This post is the first of a pair, and looks at some common words for things that are hot or warm.
I’ll start with red-hot, which is an emphatic word for something that is extremely hot. We use this adjective for objects, often metal objects, and not usually for weather or food:
Don’t touch that saucepan – it’s red-hot!
We talk about blistering or scorching (hot) weather, but we don’t usually use these words to talk about how people feel when they experience it:
They worked all afternoon in the blistering heat.
It was a scorching hot day.
There are however several words that can refer to both hot weather and the way we feel in it. These include baking (hot), boiling (hot), roasting (hot) and sweltering:
Everyone on the train was baking, but we couldn’t turn the heaters off.
It’s boiling hot here in the summer.
There was no shade on the beach and we were roasting.
We were forced to walk miles in the sweltering heat.
Scalding is an emphatic word used for liquids and implies that they will hurt you if you touch them. On the other hand, piping (hot) usually describes food or drink and is a rather positive description:
She accidentally put her hand in the scalding water.
Make sure the food is piping hot before you eat it.
If someone is too hot because they are ill, we say they have a temperature/are running a temperature, and if they are very hot because of a fever, we might say that they are burning (up):
Tom was running a temperature and feeling very ill.
She was burning up in the night.
If something is warm, it is fairly hot but not very hot. This word usually describes a pleasant temperature. Two more positive words are toasty, which usually describes a person’s body or sometimes a place that is comfortably warm, and balmy, which describes warm weather:
Make sure you stay warm if you’re going out in the snow.
My thick coat kept me toasty.
It was a balmy afternoon and we sat outside.
If you have found these words useful, look out for my next post, which will look at some of the words that describe things that are cold, or only slightly warm.
