Word.ws English Dictionary

cold sweat

cold sweat noun: perspiration which feels chilly to the person perspiring, and which indicates debilitating illness, shock, or the experiencing of an intense emotion such as despair, anxiety, or, especially, fear.

Noun

cold sweat (plural cold sweats)

  1. Perspiration which feels chilly to the person perspiring, and which indicates debilitating illness, shock, or the experiencing of an intense emotion such as despair, anxiety, or, especially, fear.
    • . . .
      And the dead were at my feet.
      The cold sweat melted from their limbs,
      Ne rot, ne reek did they;
      The look with which they look'd on me,
      Had never pass'd away.1798, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, part 4
    • He clasped his hands together, and involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror. A mist came before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face.1839, Charles Dickens, chapter 22, in Oliver Twist

cold sweat meaning in Tamil and Indonesian

cold sweat in Tamil

குளிர்ந்த வியர்வை

cold sweat in Indonesian

perspiration which feels chilly
keringat dingin

Examples of cold sweat in a sentence

  • [T]he great fear grew on me till the cold sweat ran from my brow and my soul was faint within me.1889, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 2, in Cleopatra:
  • It caused a cold sweat to ooze out all over Duane's body.1915, Zane Grey, chapter 12, in The Lone Star Ranger:
  • One could argue that the banking crisis is just the cold sweat, not the flu that follows it2008 October 9, James Saft, “The current crisis is only the beginning”, in New York Times, retrieved 16 Jul 2013:

Forms of cold sweat

pluralcold sweats
alternative formcoldsweat

Questions about cold sweat

What does cold sweat mean?
Cold sweat means perspiration which feels chilly to the person perspiring, and which indicates debilitating illness, shock, or the experiencing of an intense emotion such as despair, anxiety, or, especially, fear.
What is cold sweat in Tamil?
Cold sweat in Tamil is குளிர்ந்த வியர்வை. See Cold sweat meaning in Tamil.
How do you use cold sweat in a sentence?
[T]he great fear grew on me till the cold sweat ran from my brow and my soul was faint within me.
What part of speech is cold sweat?
Cold sweat is a noun.
What is the plural of cold sweat?
The plural of cold sweat is cold sweats.

Words near cold sweat in the dictionary

  1. cold steel and bright lights
  2. cold storage
  3. cold store
  4. cold stores
  5. Cold Sunday
  6. cold sweat
  7. cold sweats
  8. cold tail
  9. cold tap
  10. cold taps
  11. cold transfer

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cold sweat (page history and authors); cold sweat (Tamil Wiktionary) (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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Cite this entry: “cold sweat.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/cold_sweat. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.