cold sweat
12
3.7
- noun
- /koʊld swɛt/
:
sudor frío
- How many men are gonna wake up in a cold sweat tomorrow?
- broke into a cold sweat
- woke in a cold sweat
- cold sweats all night
And they can't sleep for months because of nightmares and cold sweats.
- And they can't sleep for months because of nightmares and cold sweats.
- And I went to work and I told a few other people and then I just had a kind of a full body cold sweat.
- And I'm thinking to myself in a cold sweat that that a virus was on its way, that these people sitting on stage probably knew that.
- Remember, you should be able to watch it and go to sleep and not wake up in a cold sweat worried that your healthcare won't cover cold sweats.
- Many cannot bear the thought without a cold sweat, he says.
Examples
-
Celia used her palm to wipe the cold sweat from her face.
Fiction book (1992) -
And then I wake up in a cold sweat.
-
I spent the next week and a half in a cold sweat.
Fiction book (1994) -
I woke up in bed one night in a cold sweat.
-
I woke up in a cold sweat.
-
I was watching my son die every night, and I'd wake up in a cold sweat.
-
Jacob's eyes blast open as he sits up from bed in a cold sweat.
Fiction book (1991) -
Somewhere, Richard Linklater just woke up in a cold sweat and he doesn't know why.
Blog text (26) -
Duncan woke in a cold sweat and dozed only fitfully the rest of the night.
Fiction book (1999) -
When he heard the loud crash, he broke into a cold sweat from the shock.
Synonyms
68
2.6
A feeling of nervous worry before something important
How Severe
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly built from 'cold' + 'sweat' to describe sweating while feeling cold; a learner who knows both words can infer this bodily state. The phrase is a common, largely literal description (with a conventional association to fear or illness) and has clear cross‑linguistic parallels, so it is readily understandable to B1 learners.
Etymology
Cold sweat comes from the image of someone who is so scared or sick that their skin feels cold while they are still sweating, a real picture of cold and sweat together. So it means 'sweating while feeling cold', usually because of 'fear', 'shock', or 'illness'.