Other forms: cooling, cooler, cooled, coolest, cools
Cool is cold in the pleasant amount. The untouched side of the pillow, a stone floor under bare feet in August, the air that comes off a river in the evening.
Cool is a verb as well: you cool the soup by blowing on it, and a cake has to cool before you cut it. It is a noun in the cool of the morning, and in lose your cool, meaning lose your temper. Then there is the sense that has swallowed the others - cool as praise, for a jacket, a song, a person, a plan - and its small cousin, cool as a one-word yes: cool, see you at eight. Watch the unfriendly sense, because it hides inside polite sentences: a cool reception and a cool reply are not compliments, they mean distant. And a person who stays cool in a crisis is calm, not chilly.
1adjectivecoolSlightly cold, in a way that feels good.~46%
“A cool breeze came through the window just after midnight.”
Patterncool + noun (air, breeze, water) · keep / stay cool · a cool + place · cooler than
2adjectivestylishStylish, impressive, or admired.~2%
“He thinks the leather jacket makes him look cool.”
3adjectivecomposedCalm and in control, especially under pressure.~2%
“She stayed cool while the alarm went off and everyone else panicked.”
synonyms: composed, unruffled
4adjectivepolitePolite but unfriendly.~2%
“The idea got a cool response from the rest of the committee.”
5verbbecomeTo become less hot, or to make something less hot.~46%
“Leave the pie on the rack to cool for twenty minutes.”
6nouncalmnessCalmness and self-control.~2%
“He lost his cool and threw the remote at the wall.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 6 sentences found in the wild and placed 6 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
COOL → a jump into the POOL
A hot day, and then the pool: you drop in, and for the first time since lunch you feel cool.
hooks ontopool
Cool comes straight down the Old English line, from col, which already meant cold and calm together, so the unflappable sense is a thousand years old rather than modern slang. Behind it stand Proto-Germanic *koluz and the Proto-Indo-European root *gel-, to be cold, to freeze. That same root fed Latin gelu, frost - and it is why German kuhl and Dutch koel look so familiar.
Old English
cōl
Middle English
cool
English, today
cool
Built from
From Middle English cool, from Old English cōl. From Middle English cool, from Old English cōl (“cool, cold, tranquil, calm”), from Proto-West Germanic kōl(ī), from Proto-Germanic kōluz (“cool”), from kalaną (“to be cold, to freeze”), Proto-Indo-European gel- (“to be cold, to freeze”). 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA