A cold war is a long standoff of hostility without open fighting. A new cold war.
With capital letters it names the standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union. A cold war is fought through proxies, spies and economics rather than by armies meeting.
1nouncold warThe long standoff of hostility without open fighting.
“The cold war shaped every institution built between 1947 and 1991.”
cold war is a conflict.
The phrase was popularised by George Orwell in 1945 and by Bernard Baruch in 1947.
Diachronically, a back-formation from Cold War: a common noun back-formed from the proper noun naming the first post–WWII instance of the concept; synchronically, cold + war.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in History & Eras