When you're feverish, you have a fever or feel like you have one: hot, uncomfortable, and often shaky or weak. Your forehead feels warm to the touch, you might need extra blankets one moment and want to throw them off the next, and everything feels harder than it should. Being feverish is your body's way of fighting an illness, turning up its internal temperature to battle germs.

The word also describes activity that's intense, hurried, and almost frantic. A feverish pace means working so fast and urgently that it feels almost out of control, like when a class rushes through a project the night before it's due. A crowd might work with feverish energy to build sandbag walls before a flood arrives. Scientists might conduct feverish research to solve an urgent problem.

This second meaning captures that same heated, urgent, slightly uncomfortable feeling of an actual fever. Whether describing a sick person or frantic activity, feverish suggests something operating at an intensity that can't last forever.