white-hot, a.
Also white hot (now rare).
Heated to such a degree as to radiate white light; at white heat.
| 1820 Shelley Œd. Tyr. ii. i. 172 Innocent Queens o'er white-hot ploughshares tread Unsinged. 1827 Faraday Chem. Manip. xiii. (1842) 299 Even bright red hot fuel will cool a white hot crucible. 1871 Tyndall Fragm. Sci. (1879) I. ii. 30 To display all these colours at the same time the..wire must be white-hot. |
b. transf. (rhetorically): Very bright and hot.
| 1858 Hawthorne Fr. & It. Note-bks. (1871) II. 38 Cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine. |
c. fig.: cf. white heat b and red-hot 2.
| 1885 Harper's Mag. Mar. 552/1 You occasionally turn white-hot. 1890 Le Gallienne G. Meredith 73 Not Carlyle himself had a more white-hot hatred of ‘simulacra’. |