a. Also white hot (now rare). Heated to such a degree as to radiate white light; at white heat.

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1820.  Shelley, Œd. Tyr., II. i. 172. Innocent Queens o’er white-hot ploughshares tread Unsinged.

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1827.  Faraday, Chem. Manip., xiii. (1842), 299. Even bright red hot fuel will cool a white hot crucible.

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1871.  Tyndall, Fragm. Sci. (1879), I. ii. 30. To display all these colours at the same time the … wire must be white-hot.

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  b.  transf. (rhetorically): Very bright and hot.

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1858.  Hawthorne, Fr. & It. Note-bks. (1871), II. 38. Cool and dim, after the white-hot sunshine.

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  c.  fig.: cf. WHITE HEAT b and RED-HOT 2.

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1885.  Ellen D. Hale, in Harper’s Mag., March, 552/1. You occasionally turn white-hot.

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1890.  Le Gallienne, G. Meredith, 73. Not Carlyle himself had a more white-hot hatred of ‘simulacra.’

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