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Someone used the expression “un-hot question” to describe a post that was in the Hot Network Questions despite not being “hot”, and my thoughts immediately turned to alternatives such as, ‘tepid’ or ‘lukewarm’, which made me wonder about the origins of the latter.

I have never heard of the term luke used by itself, if luke modified warm it suggested that it could be used to modify other adjectives. So why don't we say luke-tall for instance?

It seems that lukewarm is an example of a solid compound word, and Oxford Dictionaries report that lukewarm is derived from the dialect term luke.

Late Middle English: from dialect luke (probably from dialect lew ‘lukewarm’ and related to lee)+ warm.

Luckily, Online Etymology Dictionary clarifies

lukewarm

"neither cold nor hot, tepid," late 14c., from warm (adj.) + luke (adj.) "tepid" (c. 1200), a word of unknown origin. Perhaps it is from Middle Dutch or Old Frisian leuk "tepid, weak," or an unexplained variant of Old English hleowe (adv.) "warm," all of which are from Proto-Germanic *khlewaz (from PIE root *kele- (1) "warm;" compare lee).

Delving deeper, I discovered that lûke in West Frisian means “to pull”. This is relevant because West Frisian, a West Germanic language, is considered the closest related language to English by linguists.

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  The distribution of West Frisian, shown in dark blue, today in Europe

  
  
  

  

  
  

But the meanings were so different I abandoned that avenue.

Wiktionary says that the adjective luke in Middle English was also spelled leuk, leuke, and lewke. That second spelling reminded me of the word leukemia, a malignant blood cell disease, but there leuk is from the Greek “leukos” meaning bright, white, so despite having the same pronunciation and spellings, the two are completely unrelated.

An 1836 quote from Charles Dickens' The Pickwick Papers reveals that luke could come after a noun, such as ‘water’.

Let me have nine penn'orth o' brandy and water luke, and the inkstand, will you, miss?

As can be seen, the adjective warm is missing, presumably, readers in the mid-19th century were familiar with luke being used alone. Try as I could, I could not find any similar examples. With the exception of the above, it seems that luke only modifies warm

Even The Bard of Avon himself used the term lukewarm in two of his plays

May you a better feast never behold,

You knot of mouth-friends! smoke, and luke-warm water

Is your perfection.
_{Shakspeare. Timon of Athens 1605–1606}

and

I cannot rest

Until the white rose that I wear be dyed

Even in the lukewarm blood of Henry's heart.
_{Shakespeare. History of Henry VI, Part III 1591}

Questions

1. Are there other examples where luke modified different adjectives or nouns? I did a bit of searching but apart from the Dickens' quote I came up empty-handed.




2. Would I be mistaken to suggest that lukewarm is an example of reduplication? Not dissimilar to contrastive focus reduplication where the same spelled word is repeated twice (as in “WARM warm”) but in this instance, the meanings of the two words are the same.

"Lukewarm" isn't really much different than saying "tepidly warm", which is something that people definitely say. And it makes sense in the same way that "yellow orange" makes sense: "luke" was probably considered less warm than "warm", with "lukewarm" falling somewhere in the middle. (This is definitely the case for "tepid", which seems to be the closest synonym of "luke".) In any case it made enough sense that there's also the (dialect) synonym "lewwarm". Both "lewwarm" and "lew" (by itself) are still used in Scotland. If you refer back to Oxford Dictionaries, "luke" is thought to be derived from "lew", which is why this is relevant.

I haven't been able to find another semi-recent example of standalone "luke" except for the one in Dickens. Looking at the OED's citations, the others are all from pre 1500, with two examples occurring after that ("luke-hearted", ?1507; "lukeness", 1597).

There are plenty of examples from Middle English of "luke" describing things other than water:

Opened wes his breoste; þa blod com forð luke.

"Opened was his breast; the blood came forth luke."
_{Laʒamon's Brut}

It could even describe people...in the exact same way as "lukewarm" can:

He is fyeble and lheuc to alle guodes to done.

"He is feeble and luke to all God has done"
_{Ayenbite of inwyt (transl. Michel Of Northgate)}

More examples can be found in the freely available MED.

I don't think lukewarm is an example of reduplication. Warm and lukewarm are not synonyms. Something that is 'warm' is hotter than something that is 'lukewarm'.

A (nice) 'warm' bath is a comfortable place. A 'tepid' or 'lukewarm' bath is usually one I have stayed in too long and want to get out of... unless I add more hot water.

The following sources appear to support your suggestion that lukewarm is etymologically a reduplication of warm:

From Word Detective:

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does indeed employ “tepid” in its definition of “lukewarm,” and, logically, lists “lukewarm” as a direct synonym in its definition of “tepid.” The two words are, in fact, nearly identical in meaning, with the only shade of difference in usage being that “tepid” is more often applied to liquids than to solids (“Let the Water stand in the Sun till it grow tepid,” 1691).

.... “lukewarm” represents a combination of “warm” with the somewhat older English adjective “luke” (or “lew”), which itself meant “warm” (meaning that “lukewarm” etymologically amounts to a redundant “warm-warm”). “Luke” came from the Old English word “hleowe,” which meant, amazingly, “warm,” and which in turn seemed to be rooted in an Indo-European root word that meant “weakly warm.”

From World Wide Words:

Lukewarm has been spelled in all sorts of different ways down the centuries, including lew-warm, loo-warm (a necessity in our house), lewke-warm and luckwarm. The first part was mainly in dialect use and transmitted orally, so the spelling only settled down to our modern version in the eighteenth century.

Luke has, of course, nothing to do with the given name. It comes from an Old English adjective hléow that has modern relatives in Dutch and German. It may be linked to hlēo, shelter or lee, and also to another Old English word meaning debilitated that developed into lew, weak or wan. To be lukewarm is to be only weakly warm, tepid.

An odd sidelight is that from the thirteenth century, luke by itself could mean lukewarm, as could lew (the English Dialect Dictionary reported a century ago that it was then very widely used in various spellings throughout England, Scotland and Ireland). So you could argue that lukewarm means “warm warm”.

From The Grammarist:

Lukewarm describes something that is tepid or only slightly warm, something that is neither hot nor cold. ........the word lukewarm is derived from the Old English word hléow which means sunny or warm, which evolved into the Middle English word lewk. The word luke was once used on its on own to mean warm, and this use survives in the word lukewarm.

As a side note, luke also meant “nothing” as suggested by Green’s Dictionary of Slang

luke n.
[? northern dial.]

nothing.

• 1821 [UK] D. Haggart Autobiog. 17: He quized his brother for having given us so much trouble about luke.