piping hot
8
3.2
- adjective
- Informal
:
hirviendo
- I've got your coffee piping hot.
- served piping hot
- piping hot coffee
- piping hot pizza
I say, can I have a piping hot bowl of Max's soup?
- I say, can I have a piping hot bowl of Max's soup?
- All right, now back to this piping hot tea.
- So I think it's just making sure foods piping hot and that'll be steam coming off it.
- OK, now back to the piping hot tea at hand.
- So that's that's where you want to go if you want the piping hot fresh tea.
- But then we get some piping hot tea, which is that Tamelin?
Examples
-
I say, can I have a piping hot bowl of Max's soup?
-
The oatmeal was piping hot and dotted with raisins just as she liked it, but the milk, like a tiny white waterfall, was running out of the bowl onto the tray.
Fiction book (1997) -
All right, now back to this piping hot tea.
-
OK, now back to the piping hot tea at hand.
-
This stuff is piping hot.
-
I am even enjoying a cup of piping hot green tea.
Fiction book (1996) -
I am feeding her lots of piping hot herbal tea.
Blog text (2) -
The next son arrived with a tray of piping-hot little pastries and some good Telgar mountain cheeses.
Fiction book (1991) -
Piping hot French fries, cooked to order, "when you want it done" (as Michelle charmingly put it).
Blog text (7) -
I can't wait to enjoy this piping hot bowl of soup on a chilly day.
Synonyms
∞
1.0
Having a high temperature and able to burn your skin
3
3.4
Very hot and making a hissing sound
Very hot and making a sharp steam sound, like food from the oven or a pan
Antonyms
How Hot
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'extremely hot' is directly and predictably built from 'piping' as an intensifier (very/extremely) plus 'hot' (having a high temperature), so a learner who knows both words can infer the MWE meaning. This intensifier + adjective pattern is common in English and cross-linguistically familiar, making the expression transparent to B1 learners.
Etymology
The phrase piping hot comes from the idea that fresh, very hot food makes a high, whistling sound as steam leaves it, and people called that noise piping like a small pipe. So piping hot came to mean 'very hot' and 'just cooked'.