Hot hatch was originally an informal automotive industry term, shortened from hot hatchback, initially coined by the European motoring press, for a high-performance derivative of a car body style consisting of a three- or five-door hatchback cars. The term gained wide spread use during the 1980s in the UK, first as 'hot hatchback' by 1983 and then shortened to 'hot hatch' in the motoring press in 1984, and first appeared in The Times in 1985, and is now commonly and widely accepted as a mainstream, if still informal term. It is retrospectively applied to cars from the late 1970s but was not a phrase used at the time.

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