Word.ws English Dictionary

one's blood runs cold

one's blood runs cold phrase: one feels a physical shock upon realizing a direct threat to one's life, similar to the loss of blood in the brain. It affects the entire body for a few minutes, but does not cause the person to lose consciousness.

Phrase

one's blood runs cold

  1. One feels a physical shock upon realizing a direct threat to one's life, similar to the loss of blood in the brain. It affects the entire body for a few minutes, but does not cause the person to lose consciousness.
  2. One experiences a visceral feeling of fear, horror, dread, foreboding, or dysphoria (sometimes with accompanying tingling paresthesias).
    • Little Oliver's blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew's words, and imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them.1838, Charles Dickens, chapter 18, in Oliver Twist
    • [M]y blood ran cold and my heart turned to water, for there, before the cave, rolled wolves, many and great.1891, H. Rider Haggard, chapter 13, in Nada the Lily

Questions about one's blood runs cold

What does one's blood runs cold mean?
One's blood runs cold means one feels a physical shock upon realizing a direct threat to one's life, similar to the loss of blood in the brain. It affects the entire body for a few minutes, but does not cause the person to lose consciousness.
What part of speech is one's blood runs cold?
One's blood runs cold is a phrase.

Words near one's blood runs cold in the dictionary

  1. one's ass is grass
  2. one's back is up
  3. one's bark is worse than one's bite
  4. one's belly thinks one's throat has been cut
  5. one's blood is up
  6. one's blood runs cold
  7. one's born days
  8. one's cake is dough
  9. one's cotton socks off
  10. one's damned if one does and one's damned if one doesn't
  11. one's damned if one does, and one's damned if one doesn't

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: one's blood runs cold (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-one's blood runs cold.ogg.

Cite this entry: “one's blood runs cold.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/one%27s_blood_runs_cold. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.