Cold

How to spell cold

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cold

What does cold mean?

1. adjectiveHaving a low temperature; lacking warmth or heat.
2. nounA common viral infection of the nose and throat causing sneezing and a runny nose.

Cold in a sentence

• adjective

  The office felt cold after the heating was switched off.

• noun

  He caught a cold on the long flight home.

• adjective

  She warmed her cold hands over the radiator.

• noun

  A heavy cold kept her in bed for three days.

Where does cold come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Cold is a thoroughly native English word, descending from the Old English cald or ceald, which already meant exactly what it means today: lacking heat or low in temperature. It traces back through the Proto-Germanic kaldaz, the same source that gave German kalt and Dutch koud, and ultimately to a Proto-Indo-European root gel meaning 'to freeze' or 'be frozen'. That ancient root is also the ancestor of the Latin gelu 'frost' and gelidus 'icy', which is how English later acquired borrowed cousins such as 'gelid' and even 'jelly'. The sense covering a respiratory infection arose much later, from the old belief that exposure to cold weather caused the illness. Because the word is short and phonetic, the spelling has stayed remarkably stable for over a thousand years and presents almost no trap to a modern writer.

How the word is built

• cold (from Old English cald/ceald: cold), a single native root with no affixes