Meaning: hot

Illustrative Context

The rocks get hot during the day and cold at night.

Target Sense

• The default antonym of cold.
• The most basic term, typically adjectival, that covers the largest span of temperatures higher than neutral, and the middle ground of that span of temperatures (within sensible bounds of the usual temperature range in human experience).
• This should be a generic, relative term, not a specific and absolute one such as boiling hot.
• Aim for the term covering the broadest range of tactile, ambient and personal uses.
• Avoid marked, loaded, judgement terms for excessively hot, or not hot enough.
• Avoid narrow terms limited to specific uses, e.g. hot only of food, only of liquids, only of weather, and so on.
• Avoid resultative or change of state terms for made hot, heated.
• Take the default, unmarked term, i.e. avoid intensifying terms for particularly hot, as well as qualifying, weakening terms such as (only) warm.
• Many languages have just a single obvious default term, but others, particularly in the Germanic languages, have more than one common competing term, as in English hot and warm, and their cognates in almost all other Germanic languages. In English, hot is more in line with the target, and slightly commoner than warm, which has a slightly narrower, more specific sense of ‘not especially hot’. In German, warm is slightly commoner than heiß, which has a slightly narrower, more specific sense of ‘particularly hot’. In a proportion of cases, centered on our target sense, the translational equivalent of English hot is actually often German warm.

References

• On the contrasts of tactile vs. ambient in the languages of Vanuatu and in Japanese, see François (2015).
• On the contrasts of tactile vs. ambient vs. personal, see Koptjeskaja-Tamm (2011).