warm

Meanings

Adjective

• Having a temperature slightly higher than usual, but still pleasant; mildly hot.
• Caring and friendly, of relations to another person.
• Having a color in the red-orange-yellow part of the visible electromagnetic spectrum.
• Close, often used in the context of a game in which "warm" and "cold" are used to indicate nearness to the goal.
• Fresh, of a scent; still able to be traced.
• Communicating a sense of comfort, ease, or pleasantness
• Ardent, zealous.
• Well off as to property, or in good circumstances; prosperous.
• Requiring arduous effort.

Verb

• To make or keep warm.
• To become warm, to heat up.
• To favour increasingly.
• To become ardent or animated.
• To make engaged or earnest; to interest; to engage; to excite ardor or zeal in; to enliven.
• To beat or spank.
• To prepopulate (a cache) so that its contents are ready for other users.

Noun

• The act of warming, or the state of being warmed; a heating.

Related

Opposite words

• Arctic, cold, cool, frozen

Origin

• From Middle English warm, werm, from Old English wearm, from Proto-West Germanic *warm, from Proto-Germanic *warmaz, with different proposed origins:
• Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰer- ("warm, hot"), related to Ancient Greek θερμός, Latin formus, Sanskrit घर्म.
• Proto-Indo-European *wer- ("to burn"), related to Hittite and to Old Church Slavonic варити.
• The dispute is due to differing opinions on how initial Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰ- evolved in Germanic: some think that *gʷʰ would have turned to *b, and that the root *gʷʰer- would instead have given rise to burn etc. Some have also proposed a merger of the two roots.
• From Old English werman.