Word.ws English Dictionary

hot air

hot air noun: air that has been heated, especially so as to function as the lifting agent of a hot-air balloon.

Noun

hot air (uncountable)

  1. (literal) Air that has been heated, especially so as to function as the lifting agent of a hot-air balloon.
    • The balloon was equipped with a burner to create hot air for lift.
  2. (idiomatic) Empty, confused, or exaggerated talk lacking meaning or substance; bluster.
    • "You'll never get anywhere so long as youse trail with that reform bunch. It's all hot air and tomfool theory."1913, William MacLeod Raine, chapter 8, in The Vision Splendid
    • "You give me a lot of hot air about your conscience. Why don't you get a soap-box and preach on the street-corners?"1921, Alice Hegan Rice, chapter 28, in Quin

hot air meaning in Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada

hot air in Tamil

வெப்பக்காற்று

hot air in Malayalam

rubbish, nonsense, garbage
ബഡായി വർത്തമാനം, അബദ്ധം, വിഡ്ഢിത്തം, അസംബന്ധം, അർത്ഥമില്ലാത്ത ചൊല്ല്, നിരര്‍ത്ഥഭാഷണം

hot air in Kannada

ಬಿಸುಗಾಳಿ

Examples of hot air in a sentence

  • Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.2001 June 24, Johanna McGeary, “How Bad Is China?”, in Time, retrieved 22 Sep 2013:
  • Enough already of the international summit meetings that produce sirocco-quality hot air, and nonbinding agreements that bind us all to more emissions.2014 November 6, Rob Nixon, “Naomi Klein’s ‘This Changes Everything’”, in New York Times:
  • More like hot air to me, given Harper's emphasis on the private sector through both a kind of renewed franchising model and open access.2023 March 8, Christian Wolmar, “Labour passes up the chance to deliver a forceful rail policy”, in RAIL, number 978, page 34:

Words formed from hot air

Questions about hot air

What does hot air mean?
Hot air means air that has been heated, especially so as to function as the lifting agent of a hot-air balloon.
What is hot air in Tamil?
Hot air in Tamil is வெப்பக்காற்று. See Hot air meaning in Tamil.
How do you use hot air in a sentence?
Some of the steam in Washington rises from real issues, but a lot is the hot air of partisan politics.
What part of speech is hot air?
Hot air is a noun.

Words near hot air in the dictionary

  1. hot
  2. hot abscess
  3. hot abscesses
  4. hot ache
  5. hot adult contemporary
  6. hot air
  7. hot air balloon
  8. hot air balloons
  9. hot and bothered
  10. hot and cold
  11. hot and heavy

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hot air (page history and authors); hot air (Tamil Wiktionary) (page history and authors); hot air (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); hot air (Kannada Wiktionary) (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-hot air.ogg.

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