Word.ws English Dictionary

cold turkey

cold turkey noun: a sudden and complete withdrawal from a dependent substance, especially a drug.

Noun

cold turkey (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic, informal) A sudden and complete withdrawal from a dependent substance, especially a drug.
  2. The physiological effects of such a withdrawal.
  3. (US, slang) Something exposed as a target due to surmountable defense.

Adverb

cold turkey (not comparable)

  1. (idiomatic) Not gradually; all at once; referring especially to quitting a habit by force of will rather than by a gradual reduction.
    • It is difficult, but possible to quit smoking cold turkey.
    • I knew that, if I had daily access to video games, I would spend literally every day playing them, forever. So I cut myself off, more or less cold turkey, and as a result I was more or less happy and productive.2012 April 4, Sam Anderson, “Just One More Game ...”, in The New York Times Magazine, archived from the original on 12 Nov 2020

Verb

cold turkey (third-person singular simple present cold turkeys, present participle cold turkeying, simple past and past participle cold turkeyed)

  1. (informal, intransitive) To undergo sudden and complete withdrawal from a dependent substance, especially a drug.

Synonyms of cold turkey

Forms of cold turkey

third-person singular presentcold turkeys
present participlecold turkeying
past participlecold turkeyed
pastcold turkeyed

Origin of cold turkey

Various explanations; see Cold turkey § Etymology on Wikipedia.

Questions about cold turkey

What does cold turkey mean?
Cold turkey means a sudden and complete withdrawal from a dependent substance, especially a drug.
What part of speech is cold turkey?
Cold turkey can be a noun, an adverb or a verb.

Words near cold turkey in the dictionary

  1. cold transfers
  2. cold trap
  3. cold traps
  4. cold treatment
  5. cold treatments
  6. cold turkey
  7. cold turkeyed
  8. cold turkeying
  9. cold turkeys
  10. cold ulcer
  11. cold ulcers

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: cold turkey (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-cold turkey.ogg.

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