The story
The usual explanation is a tidy one. Newspapers were once set in hot metal: molten lead was poured into molds to make the type. So, the story goes, freshly printed pages came off the press warm.
But the phrase is older than those machines. Hot-metal typesetting took off in the 1880s, and English printers were boasting about fresh pages long before. A 1774 advertisement for a London magazine said it was “Hot from the Press.” A play from 1804 has a character holding “my pamphlet hot from the press.”
The word historian at Word Histories suggests “hot” here simply meant new, the same way news is hot. A letter from Persia in 1569 already spoke of “the hot newes.”
The form we use now, with “off,” is a 20th-century American update. A New Jersey newspaper ad in July 1910 offered a price list “Just hot off the press.”
