Definition of "temperature"

Of all the transitions brought about on the Earth’s surface by temperature change, the melting of ice into water is the starkest. It is binary. And for the land beneath, the air above and the life around, it changes everything.

2013 May 11, “The climate of Tibet: Pole-land”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8835, page 80

"Aren't you feeling so well this morning?" she asked him anxiously. "Do you think you've got a temperature?"

1951, Josephine Tey, The Daughter of Time

In consequence, macroscopic amounts of matter in thermal contact with one another tend to be at the same temperature, a fact of sufficient fundamental importance to merit belated designation as the Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics.

2000 September, Clinton D. Stoner, “Inquiries into the Nature of Free Energy and Entropy in Respect to Biochemical Thermodynamics”, in Entropy‎, volume 2, number 3, pages 106–141

But it is both easier and more accurate to take the industry's true temperature at small private gatherings like a conference organized by the Ziff Davis publishing company in northern California last week.

2005 August 20, Seth Schiesel, “Taking the Temperature of the Creative Body”, in The New York Times‎

Our intemperence it is that pulls so many several incurable diseases on our heads, that hastens old age, perverts our temperature, and brings upon us sudden death.

1624, Democritus Junior [pseudonym; Robert Burton], The Anatomy of Melancholy: […], 2nd edition, Oxford, Oxfordshire: Printed by John Lichfield and James Short, for Henry Cripps

[…] that not only the production of a rational Being was concern'd in it, but that possibly the happy foundation and temperature of his body, perhaps his genius and the very cast of his mind […]

1759–1767, [Laurence Sterne], The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, volumes (please specify |volume=I to IX), London: […] T. Becket and P. A. Dehondt, […]

Only a strong dose of love will cure / A woman with an angry temperature.

1993, James Michie, trans. Ovid, The Art of Love, Book II