Word of the Week: teplý – ‘warm’

As the summer sun finally begins to shine over Czechia, a useful word to know is teplý, an Czech adjective meaning ‘warm’.

Teplý and warm share no common origin, but if we look around the Indo-European family to which English and Czech belong, we can find some relatives of teplý. Latin, another member of the family, has for example the verb tepēre ‘to be warm’. This verb shares its ancient tep- root and meaning with Czech teplý.

It was from Latin tepēre that English got another word for talking about warmth: tepid!