1 [C,usually sing,U] if sb has a temper, they become angry very easily:
a violent / short / quick temper * He must learn to control his temper. * She broke the plates in a fit of temper. * After an hour of waiting, tempers began to fray (= people began to get angry).
2 [C,usually sing.] a short period of feeling very angry:
to fly into a temper * She says awful things when she's in a temper. * Some small children have terrible temper tantrums.
3 [C] the way that you are feeling at a particular time
SYNMOOD:
Come back when you're in a better temper. * to be in a bad / filthy / foul temper
4 (-tempered) (in adjectives) having a particular type of temper:
good- / bad-tempered * a sweet-tempered child
HELPNOTE You will find other compounds ending in -tempered at their place in the alphabet.
IDIOMS
lose / keep your temper (with sb) to fail/manage to control your anger:
She lost her temper with a customer and shouted at him. * I struggle to keep my temper with the kids when they misbehave.
IDIOMS see QUICKadj.
verb [VN]
1 ~ sth (with sth) (formal) to make sth less severe by adding sth that has the opposite effect:
Justice must be tempered with mercy. * The hot sunny days were tempered by a light breeze. * His delight was tempered by regret.
2 (technical) to make metal as hard as it needs to be by heating and then cooling it:
tempered steel
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About this entry
This is a English–English dictionary entry.
Sourced from Main Dictionary in Lughet's collection.
This word also appears under other sources in Lughet's collection — see the list below.
This entry for temper is sourced from Main Dictionary, one of the dictionaries and corpora merged into Lughet.
Is temper a noun, verb, or something else?
In this entry, temper is tagged as noun.
Does temper appear elsewhere on Lughet?
Yes — temper appears under other sources or language pairs in Lughet's collection. See the list below.
What is Lughet?
Lughet is a free trilingual dictionary covering nearly five million entries across Uyghur, Chinese, and English, drawn from more than ten source dictionaries and corpora.
