Why Are Some Competitions “Heats”?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Leslie Ehrlich from Ithaca.

Hey, Leslie, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was curious about why the qualifying race is called a heat before the main event, when they’re trying to pick participants to run in a race.

And what got you to wondering about this, Leslie?

I don’t know.

Okay.

That’s fair.

So it’s not keeping you awake at night or anything like that?

It’s not keeping me awake at night, nor have I ever attended a horse race or even a human race except for my kids in high school.

So go figure.

So why are they called heats?

These are the little races they do before the big race, right?

Yes, exactly.

To determine who is qualified to run.

Well, it goes back about five centuries ago when there was this thing you could do in English where you would call an instance of heating something over a fire as a heat.

Like you might have one instance of putting an iron in a fire to soften it for metal work was one heat.

Or you might heat up concrete or chunks of metal for whatever metal work or a lot of other purposes.

That also would be known as a heat.

And a round of physical activity of your body was known as a heat.

You know, one instance of, let’s say, chopping wood, that’d be one heat.

And so if you’ve ever seen a horse race, I know you haven’t, but maybe on TV, you’ve probably seen that they can work up quite a sweat.

You know, they get quite heated.

And so it’s a natural thing that we would call that a heat as well.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

With horses, it was first used to refer to their exercise runs or their warm-ups before a race.

But after a while, it came to refer to kind of a single race in an overall competition, you know, where they kind of figure out everyone’s standing before they get to the big deal kind of one where the grand trophy is handed out.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

All right.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, so after the horse racing, it naturally spread to other things like automobiles, and then with humans, athletic and non-athletic competitions.

So you can have heats of spelling bees, for example.

Oh, is that what they call them?

They don’t call them rounds?

Oh, they probably call them rounds, but you could still call them heats, right?

Well, yeah, you could burn a lot of calories, you know, trying to remember how to spell that word.

Doesn’t your brain burn the most calories when you’re just sitting still?

It’s the one burning up the most energy.

I just heard the percentage the other day, and it’s huge.

That’s why those chess masters lose weight during tournaments, because their brains are working so hard.

I forget the percentage, but it’s really high.

What’s the linguistic question keeping you awake at night?

We’d love to hear about it.

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