This is just a quick one but a surprisingly complicated topic – different words for ‘hot’ and ‘cold’. Syrian Arabic has a surprisingly large inventory of different words for these two concepts.
Weather is described as شوب shoob ‘hot’ or برد bar@d ‘cold’. You probably know these two, but you might not realise that they’re not adjectives but nouns. They most commonly appear in the éddénye X construction described by Caitlyn here and by me here – literally ‘the world is heat’, ‘the world is cold’. You can also use them as normal nouns in contexts like ما بحب البرد ‘I don’t like the cold’ or الشوب بنعسني ‘hot [weather] makes me sleepy’.
You can describe yourself as hot or cold (in the literal temperature sense) using the two participles مشوب mshawweb and بردان bardaan. These come with their own verbs – shawwab ‘get hot’ and béred ‘get cold’. As mentioned here past tense verbs are often used in a sense synonymous with their participles, so don’t be surprised to hear شوبت shawwab@t (literally ‘I got hot’) for ‘I’m hot’.
You can also be دفيان dafyaan or دافي daafi (from دفي يدفى défi yédfa), ‘warm’ in a pleasant sense – and this one has a causative, too, دفى daffa. شي بدفي shi bidaffi is ‘something that warms [you] up’. The form V تدفى tdaffa is used predictably in an intransitive sense to mean ‘warm up’ or ‘get warm’ – بدي اتدفى ‘I want to warm up’.
Food (i.e. spicy food) is حار – in fact this is the main thing which 7aarr is used for in colloquial. From this there’s the lovely verb حرحر which is used when talking about spicy food: 7ar7ar@t means ‘I burnt my mouth’.
Liquids (e.g. water) are دافي daafi ‘warm’, سخن sékhen ‘hot’ or بارد baared ‘cold’. The second one sounds very similar to bar@d, but is in fact an adjective and takes agreement. Water for example is usually sékhne or baarde. A hot/warm bath is حمام دافي.
For heating something up – water for example, or food – you can use the causative سخّن sakhkhan. And of course there’s a normal verb too, سخن يسخن sakhan yéskhon, for ‘get hot’. This is also used figuratively for people – سخنان sakhnaan means ‘having a fever’.
There’s another word for ‘hot’ used in a similar context: 7aami or 7amyaan, the participle of 7émi/yé7ma. You can use both this and sékhen for objects: دق الحديد وهو حامي dé22 él7adiid w-huwwe 7aami is the Shami equivalent of ‘strike while the iron is hot’. But don’t describe yourself as 7amyaan – unless you’re specifically looking to express the meaning ‘horny’.
Places are also (if we’re talking ‘warm’ instead of ‘hot’) دافي or بارد – for example, you can say البيت دافي ‘the house is warm’.
Warming up in the sports sense is حمّى, the form II from حامي.
Other people (in the sense of sexy) can be hundreds of different things. مز mozz(e) can be used for women or men. Syrian terms for attractive women include صاروخ ‘rocket’ and قطة ‘cat’.