Where did Paris Hilton’s signature phrase come from?

Throughout the 2000s, Paris Hilton’s most common response in any situation was, “That’s hot.” The heiress turned entrepreneur revealed in her new book, ‘Paris: A Memoir’, that the infamous catchphrase originally came from her sister, Nicky Hilton.

The phrase became infamous on Hilton’s reality show, ‘Simple Life’, where she and then bestie Nicole Richie lived the rural life, learning how to cook, farm, and socialize with everyday people at local gatherings.

Whenever Hilton and Ritchie faced an unknown situation and were obviously horrified — such as the prospect of milking a cow, fixing a truck, or cleaning a turkey, one of the two would often simply respond, “That’s hot,” a reaction that often comes off as quite comical.

Paris Hilton’s well-documented diary

Paris Hilton wrote about the origin of “That’s hot” in her revealing new memoir. The ‘Stars Are Blind’ singer dates the catchphrase all the way back to middle school.

“I kept an ornately BeDazzled diary,” Hilton reveals in the book, “in which I recorded all the middle school cheerleader drama and page upon page of ideas for inventions, thoughts about life, poems, dreams, doodles, tirades against anyone who hurt my feelings, odes to whatever boy I was crushing on, and lavishly illustrated stream-of-consciousness stories about wild horses, unicorns, and animal kingdoms.

“At some point, I heard Nicky say ‘That’s hot,’ and it resonated with me,” the 42-year-old reality show star recalled. “I wrote it in my diary and doodled flowers and fireworks around it. It’s such a great statement, isn’t it? Positive. Unpretentious. The word hot is evocative; there’s energy in it.”

“A little positive affirmation [...] It’s like ‘I see you’—but hotter.”

“That’s hot” snowballs

As Paris Hilton progressed through school, she continued to test drive the phrase in her diary.

“Suddenly there seemed to be a lot of things in my world that deserved this little accolade, and I recorded them faithfully in my diary,” Hilton wrote.

“Mom got me markers with glitter in them. That’s hot. We learned how to diagram sentences. That’s hot. Nicole [Richie] is sleeping over the whole weekend. That’s hot.”

Since she wrote the phrase all the time, Hilton started saying it among her friends and classmates at school.

“Pretty soon all the kids in my class were saying, ‘That’s hot,’” the heiress wrote. “Like I made ‘fetch’ happen!”