Word.ws English Dictionary

heat-ray

heat-ray noun: a weapon that fires a beam of extremely high temperature.

Noun

heat-ray (plural heat-rays)

  1. A weapon that fires a beam of extremely high temperature.
    • Near-synonyms: ray-gun, ray gun, death ray, energy weapon
    • In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned[.]1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 125
  2. (dated) Synonym of calorific ray.
    Synonyms:
    calorific ray

Synonyms of heat-ray

Forms of heat-ray

pluralheat-rays

Origin of heat-ray

The fictional sense was coined by British science fiction author H. G. Wells in 1896 in The War of the Worlds.

Questions about heat-ray

What does heat-ray mean?
Heat-ray means a weapon that fires a beam of extremely high temperature.
What part of speech is heat-ray?
Heat-ray is a noun.
What is the plural of heat-ray?
The plural of heat-ray is heat-rays.

Words near heat-ray in the dictionary

  1. heat wave
  2. heat waves
  3. heat-and-eat
  4. heat-labile
  5. heat-proof
  6. heat-ray
  7. heat-rays
  8. heat-resistant
  9. heat-seal
  10. heat-sealed
  11. heat-sealing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heat-ray (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “heat-ray.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heat-ray. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.