Word.ws English Dictionary

in the hot seat

in the hot seat prepositional phrase: under pressure to perform; under scrutiny; at the center of attention.

Prepositional phrase

  1. (idiomatic) Under pressure to perform; under scrutiny; at the center of attention.
    • They really put me in the hot seat during that last job interview. They asked lots of tough questions.
    • Mr. Tenev, 33, is now in the hot seat again after Robinhood abruptly curtailed its customers’ trading last week amid a frenzy in stocks such as GameStop, which were driven sky high by an army of online investors.2021 February 2, Nathaniel Popper, Kellen Browning, Erin Griffith, “Robinhood’s C.E.O. Is in the Hot Seat”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Forms of in the hot seat

alternative formon the hot seat

Questions about in the hot seat

What does in the hot seat mean?
In the hot seat means under pressure to perform; under scrutiny; at the center of attention.
What part of speech is in the hot seat?
In the hot seat is a prepositional phrase.

Words near in the hot seat in the dictionary

  1. in the hole
  2. in the hope of
  3. in the hope that
  4. in the hopper
  5. in the hospital
  6. in the hot seat
  7. in the house
  8. in the hunt
  9. in the interest of justice
  10. in the interest of time
  11. in the interim

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: in the hot seat (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-in the hot seat.ogg.

Cite this entry: “in the hot seat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/in_the_hot_seat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.