run a temperature

verb

run a temperature

verb

1

Idiomatic To have a fever.

My child's running a high temperature.
At first she "ran a temperature" in American parlance, and I could not resist the exquisite caloricity of unexpected delights—Venus febriculosa—though it was a very languid Lolita that moaned and coughed and shivered in my embrace.1955, Vladimir Nabokov, chapter 12, in Lolita, 1st American edition, New York, N.Y.: G[eorge] P[almer] Putnam’s Sons, published August 1958, →OCLC, part 2, page 200:

Synonyms: run a fever

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.