Word.ws English Dictionary

overheated

overheated is the simple past and past participle of overheat.

Meaning of overheat

Verb

overheat (third-person singular simple present overheats, present participle overheating, simple past and past participle overheated)

  1. (transitive) To heat excessively.
    • 'Made one quite thankful to get back to the fug, though as a rule I think the way these trains are overheated is something scandalous'.1934, Agatha Christie, chapter 8, in Murder on the Orient Express, London: HarperCollins, published 2017, page 131
  2. (intransitive) To become excessively hot.
  3. To grow too quickly in an uncontrolled way.
    • Dalio said that the Chinese economy was in danger of overheating, and somebody asked how a Chinese slowdown would affect the price of oil and other commodities.2011 July 18, John Cassidy, “Mastering the Machine”, in The New Yorker, →ISSN

See all 4 meanings of overheat

Adjective

overheated (comparative more overheated, superlative most overheated)

  1. Excessively heated.
    • Been getting tired of my motor running / Feeling overheated 'cause my life keeps coming / My heart has been troubled by the speed of love2010, Ghostland Observatory, “Sad Sad City”, in Paparazzi Lightning
    • He was hooked immediately by the overheated imagery, the overblownness of it all. No writer he read had ever communicated that feeling of an incomprehensible madness.2011, Jason Zinoman, Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror, New York, N.Y.: The Penguin Press, →ISBN, page 61

Forms of overheated

comparativemore overheated
superlativemost overheated

Words formed from overheated

Questions about overheated

What does overheated mean?
Overheated means excessively heated.
What is overheated the simple past and past participle of?
Overheated is the simple past and past participle of overheat.
What part of speech is overheated?
Overheated is an adjective.

Words near overheated in the dictionary

  1. overhearings
  2. overhears
  3. overheartily
  4. overhearty
  5. overheat
  6. overheated
  7. overheatedly
  8. overheatedness
  9. overheater
  10. overheaters
  11. overheating

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: overheated (page history and authors); overheat (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: “overheated.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/overheated. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.