Woods wrote:Adjective qualifying "hot"I'm thinking of stone-cold - what would be an equivalent for "hot"? I mean something so hot that when you touch it you drop it or you get shocked or something like that. Will
drop-hot + noun work?
And how could I call this attribute to the adjective grammatically? I was wondering what term to type to google what I was looking for.
I think I was able to find something actually:
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-adjective-for-hotBut my question is only partly answered so I post it.
"Stone-cold" is a compound adjective made up of an intensifying noun (special intensifier) and an adjective.
For example, these are common:
blood red
bone dry
crystal clear
dirt cheap
dirt poor
ice cold
paper thin
pitch black
razor sharp
rock hard
sky blue
snow white
stone cold
wafer thin
Basically there are only certain ones that are used idiomatically in English; we can't normally "invent" new ones with some random noun and adjective combination, and an invented one most likely wouldn't sound as natural or have as clear a meaning. You can't even replace the words above with a synonym without it sounding strange (for example, we say "razor-sharp" but not "knife-sharp", "ice-cold" but not "snow-cold").
I can't think of a noun-adjective intensifier to use with "hot". But the ones Dormouse suggested ("burning hot" or "scalding hot") are good. "Red-hot" might also work.
There are others that probably wouldn't work as well for your context of picking up something that is too hot to touch, such as "boiling hot" (for liquids), "piping hot" (for foods and drinks), "scorching hot" (for dry, radiative heat), "sweltering hot" (for humid, sweat-causing heat), etc.
Drop-hot definitely does not work. Aside from the fact that it isn't an existing idiomatic expression, it wouldn't even make a good candidate for one because usually when a compound adjective is formed with a verb, the verb is in the -ing form ("burning hot", "freezing cold", "dripping wet", "hopping mad" etc.). And, usually the thing being described is what does the action (
it burns
you,
it drips, etc.), but it your example it's the other way around. I'm not sure if those are rules - there may be exceptions I'm not thinking of, but those are some of the reasons "drop-hot" doesn't sound right to me.