An archaic or dialectal word meaning to heat, make hot, or to become heated.
From Old English hǽtan, from hāt (hot). This is a regular Old English verb formation from the adjective 'hot,' similar to how 'cool' can become 'to cool.' It survived into modern dialects despite being superseded by 'heat' in standard English.
Hete is a linguistic fossil that shows how English's regular verb system works—you can almost see the logic as 'hot' becomes 'hete' (to make hot), but this form lost the competition with 'heat' around the 14th century, a reminder that language evolution isn't always logical.
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