Word.ws English Dictionary

cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey

cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey adjective: extremely cold.

Adjective

cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (not comparable)

  1. (slang) Extremely cold.
    • It was a bitterly cold, snowy and wind-blown evening in early January when I told my son that it was, "Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey." Needless to say, he laughed and agreed with me.2003, Douglas McLaughlin, The Back Porch Philosopher, →ISBN
    • There were a few kids there already, and had a fire going on shore, some were huddled around the fire. I couldn't bame them, it was cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.2008, Baka Imre, The Sound of Guns, →ISBN, page 44

Origin of cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey

Unknown. There is a discredited theory that it refers to a brass container for cannon balls on a British man-of-war, and a somewhat more plausible theory that "brass monkey" used to refer to a cannon on a man-of-war.

Questions about cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey

What does cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey mean?
Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey means extremely cold.
What part of speech is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey?
Cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey is an adjective.

Words near cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey in the dictionary

  1. cold emailed
  2. cold emailing
  3. cold emailings
  4. cold emails
  5. cold empathy
  6. cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey
  7. cold extraction
  8. cold extractions
  9. cold feet
  10. cold finger
  11. cold fingers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey.ogg.

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