white-hot

• white hot

• Rhymes: -ɒt

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:

     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, →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, 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.