overheat
/əʊvəˈhiːt
/verb
1Make or become too hot: [no object]: her car started to overheat [with object]: it’s vital not to overheat the liquid...
- We raised our eyebrows at each other, and gave sympathetic smiles to those who were stuck at the side of the road because their car had overheated.
- Two million cars overheat daily in smog-choked traffic jams on the ever-increasing suite of 12-lane ringroads.
- My car decided to overheat intermittently, the iPod started to skip, and my phone decided it wouldn't recognise its SIM card.
1.1Make or become too excited: (as adjective overheated) his overheated imagination...
- Such ‘unitarianism of the Spirit’ is no figment of some overheated Roman imagination.
- The result, McGinn sympathetically explains, is the cooling of an overheated imagination.
- It's the last real upset of the day and the only thing that was overheating was the imagination of the person who reported it.
2 [no object] (Of a country’s economy) show marked inflation when increased demand results in rising prices rather than increased output: in 1987 the Treasury had allowed the economy to overheat...
- The economy overheats and stock prices diverge wildly from any semblance of reasonable valuation.
- First, there is less danger that the U.S. economy can overheat when much of domestic demand can be satisfied by foreign production capacity.
- The IMF is worried China's economy could overheat and generate a troubling inflation that would raise the risk of an economic crash.