white-hot

English

White-hot steel pours like water from a 35-ton electric furnace

Alternative forms

• white hot

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -ɒt

Adjective

white-hot (not comparable)

1. Hot enough to glow with a bright white light.
   • 1945 January and February, A Former Pupil, “Some Memories of Crewe Works—III”, in Railway Magazine, page 14:

     The heat of the fire, the steam which arose from the dampening water, the hard slogging at the white-hot metal of the links, and the continual pulling of lengths of chain, were calculated to put a test on the strongest of men, and often on hot summer days they had to be sent home, for the work became unbearable.

2. (figurative) Extremely fervid or zealous.

   a white-hot rage

   • 2023 August 5, Ben Sisario, “How Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour Conquered the World”, in New York Times‎^[1]:

     Swift’s catalog of generation-defining hits and canny marketing sense have helped her achieve a level of white-hot demand and media saturation not seen since the 1980s heyday of Michael Jackson and Madonna […]

   • 2023 November 17, Oliver Haynes, “Five years on, the world is failing to learn the gilets jaunes’ lesson about class and climate”, in The Guardian‎^[2], →ISSN:

     French protests are always lively, but as the journalist John Lichfield observed, “the white-hot anger” of the gilets jaunes was “something new and different”.

3. Blazing.
   • 2017, Brad Abraham, Magicians Impossible: A Novel‎^[3], St. Martin's Publishing Group, →ISBN, page 352:

     Flames raced up the rows, blistering and charring and igniting ancient wood that erupted in a white-hot flare of heat.

Translations

hot enough to glow

• Bulgarian: нажежен до бяло (nažežen do bjalo)
• Chinese:

  Mandarin: 白热 (zh) (bái rè)

• German: weißglühend (de)
• Hebrew: מְלֻבָּן m (m'lub'an)
• Turkish: akkor (tr)

fervid

• Polish: no equivalent term in Polish, but see rozpalać do białości impf, rozpalić do białości pf