het up

Irregular form of heat up. The adjective was originally a metaphorical use of the past participle het up (“heated up”), perhaps as a reference to agitation caused by fever or the churn of boiling water, but has since lexicalised as a fossil in standard English.

• heat up, heated up, heaten up, hetted up

het up

1. (dialectal) simple past and past participle of heat up

het up (comparative more het up, superlative most het up)

1. (chiefly colloquial, originally figurative) Excited, agitated or frantic.

   Try to keep your cool and not get het up.

   • 1914 October – 1916 July, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Mucker, Chicago, Ill.: A[lexander] C[aldwell] McClurg & Co., published 31 October 1921, →OCLC:

     "I reckon," he said, directing his remarks toward no one in particular, "that we've all been rather hasty in this matter, being het up as we were with the strain of what we been through an' so it seems to me, […]

   • 1932, Delos W. Lovelace, King Kong, published 1965, page 62:

     ‘What ever happened ashore to get that cold old turtle so het up?’ he demanded.

   • 2021, John H. McWhorter, chapter 6, in Woke Racism, New York: Forum, →ISBN:

     We must do an end run around these people, not make the mistake of thinking they are just “het up” or have wended a few yards into a wrong turn.

• Although colloquial, the adjective het up (“excited; agitated; frantic”) is used and understood in most major varieties of English. However, many modern speakers no longer associate het up with the verb heat up, since het (“heated”) has been fully displaced as the past form of heat in the standard language, so the connection to the original metaphor has been lost. As such, speakers may misinterpret dialectal uses of the literal past participle het up (“heated up”) as the adjective het up (“excited; agitated; frantic”) without further context.

het up (third-person singular simple present hets up, present participle hetting up, simple past and past participle hetted up or het up)

1. dialectal form of heat up