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In 1979, Lisa Heschong proposed a thermal environment ‘rich in cultural associations’ celebrating ‘delight’ and the ‘bonds of affection and ceremony'.^[1] She described throughout her book Thermal Delight in Architecture an obsolescence of thermal symbolism in the mechanically controlled contemporary interior.

Through analysis of metaphors, idioms and synonyms of heat used in English as a global lingua franca^[2] for business, economics and politics brought together in a database of over 1000 entries drawn from dictionary sources, I propose that our thermal culture is not primarily one of cosiness and comfort, but a contested and layered discursive field of power, economics, desire, love, productivity and war. These are not poetic embellishments, they are actively used in everyday communication.

[1] Heschong, Lisa. Thermal delight in architecture. MIT press, 1979

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There are two ways to search the database: one is by metaphor source, these are the words for temperature (for example: hot, cold, warm, chillax, steamy); the other is a keyword search within the definitions, which can organise the database according to the conceptual domains that the metaphor refers to (for example: comfort, hostility).

The search can be optimised by wildcards: e.g. hostil% will give all results for hostile, hostility, and hostilities.
Typing a space after a word - for example "war " will ensure that only words related to war will be shown (whereas "war" without a space, will give warm, warmth, etc.)