To become warmer and melt, especially when ice or snow turns into water; can also mean to become friendlier after being cold or distant.
From Old English 'thawian,' related to German 'tauen.' The word originally applied only to physical melting but expanded to describe emotional warming, likely because the metaphor felt so natural—frozen hearts thaw just like ice.
This word perfectly shows how we use weather as a metaphor for emotions: we say someone has 'warmed up' to us or things are 'icy between us'—it's because our ancestors spent so much time fighting actual cold that freezing and melting became nature's poetry for relationships.
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