Other forms: coldest, colder, colds
Cold means having a very low temperature. A cold day, cold hands, the water is cold.
As a noun, a cold is the common viral infection — catch a cold, have a cold — and the cold is low temperature generally: come in out of the cold. Of a person, cold means unfriendly: a cold reception, cold comfort. The idioms are many: cold feet, meaning last-minute nerves; in cold blood; leave somebody out in the cold; and blow hot and cold, meaning to keep changing your mind.
1adjectivecoldHaving a very low temperature.~49%
“Close the window; it's cold in here.”
2adjectiveunfriendlyUnfriendly.~2%
“It was a cold reception and nobody offered them a chair.”
3nouncommonA common viral infection of the nose and throat.~49%
“He has had the same cold for about a fortnight.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 10 sentences found in the wild and placed 8 of them on a sense (2 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
cold is a low temperature, or an illness.
Old English cald descends from a Proto-Indo-European root meaning to freeze, which also gives Latin gelidus and English chill, cool and congeal. The whole family has meant the same thing for five thousand years.
Proto-Indo-European
*gel- — to be cold, to freeze
Proto-Germanic
*kaldaz — cold
Proto-West Germanic
*kald
ang-ang
cald
Middle English
cold
English, today
cold
Built from
Middle English cold, from ang-ang cald. The West Saxon form, ċeald (“cold”), survived as early Middle English cheald, cheld or chald. Both descended from Proto-West Germanic kald, from Proto-Germanic kaldaz (“cold”), a participle form of kalaną (“to be cold, to freeze”), from Proto-Indo-European gel- (“to be cold, to freeze”). 2 Cognate with Scots cauld (“cold”), stq koold (“cold”), West Frisian kâld (“cold”), gsw chalt, choalt, cholt, chélte (“cold”), bar ckolt, kholt, koid, kòlt (“cold”), gmw-cfr kalt (“cold”), cim kalt, khalt (“cold”), Dutch koud (“cold”), German kalt (“cold”), Low German kold, koolt (“cold”), lb kal (“cold”), mhn khòlt, kòlt (“cold”), wym kāłt (“cold”), Yiddish קאַלט (“cold”), Danish kold (“cold”), Faroese and Icelandic kaldur (“cold”), Norwegian Bokmål kald (“cold”), Norwegian Nynorsk kald, kald’u (“cold”), Swedish kall (“cold”), Gothic 𐌺𐌰𐌻𐌳𐍃 (“cold”); also Latin gelū, gelum, gelus (“frost; chill, cold”), be хо́лад (“cold”), Bulgarian хлад (“chill, coolness”), Czech chlad (“cold”), mk лад (“shade; coolness”), Polish chłód (“cold”), Russian and Ukrainian хо́лод (“cold”), Serbo-Croatian хла̑д, hlȃd (“shade”), Sanskrit जड (“cold; stiff”), जल (“water”). Related to cool.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA