Word.ws English Dictionary

cold shoulder

cold shoulder noun: a deliberate act of disrespect; a slight or snub. Also the alternative form of cold-shoulder.

Noun

cold shoulder (plural cold shoulders)

  1. (idiomatic) A deliberate act of disrespect; a slight or snub.
    • Winterbourne wondered how she felt about all the cold shoulders that were turned toward her, and sometimes it annoyed him to suspect that she did not feel at all.1879, Henry James, Daisy Miller, London: Harper & Brothers
    • I went meekly aboard a few of the boats that lay packed together like sardines at the long St. Louis wharf, and very humbly inquired for the pilots, but got only a cold shoulder and short words from mates and clerks.1883, Mark Twain [pseudonym; Samuel Langhorne Clemens], Life on the Mississippi, Boston, Mass.: James R[ipley] Osgood and Company, →OCLC

Also used as

cold shoulder is also the alternative form of cold-shoulder.

Forms of cold shoulder

Noun
pluralcold shoulders
alternative formcold-shoulder
alternative formcoldshoulder
Verb
third-person singular presentcold shoulders
present participlecold shouldering
past participlecold shouldered
pastcold shouldered

Origin of cold shoulder

See give someone the cold shoulder.

Questions about cold shoulder

What does cold shoulder mean?
Cold shoulder means a deliberate act of disrespect; a slight or snub.
What part of speech is cold shoulder?
Cold shoulder is a noun.
What is the plural of cold shoulder?
The plural of cold shoulder is cold shoulders.

Words near cold shoulder in the dictionary

  1. cold shock response
  2. cold shock responses
  3. cold shoe
  4. cold shoes
  5. cold short
  6. cold shoulder
  7. cold shoulder sleeve
  8. cold shoulder sleeves
  9. cold shouldered
  10. cold shouldering
  11. cold shoulders

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cold shoulder (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 shoulder.ogg.

Cite this entry: “cold shoulder.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cold_shoulder. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.