Cooled

How to spell cooled

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce cooled

What does cooled mean?

1. verbBecame or was made less hot; lost heat.

Cooled in a sentence

• The soup cooled on the windowsill before she served it.

• The engine finally cooled after the long uphill drive.

Where does cooled come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the past tense of the verb 'cool', which traces back to the Old English 'colian', meaning 'to lose heat' or 'to become cold'. That verb grew directly out of the Old English adjective 'col', the ancestor of our modern 'cold', and both belong to a wider family of Germanic words for chilliness, including the Dutch 'koel' and the German 'kuhl'. The adjective and the verb have travelled together for more than a thousand years, so 'cool' could describe both a low temperature and the act of reducing one. Over time the figurative senses grew, so by the 1600s a person could be described as 'cool' meaning calm or unexcited, and much later, in twentieth-century American slang, as fashionable or admirable. The regular past form simply adds '-ed', which is why 'cooled' keeps the double 'o' of its root intact rather than collapsing it.

How the word is built

• cool (root: not warm)
• -ed (past tense/past participle suffix)