stone cold
1
3.6
- idiom
- /stoʊn koʊld/
- Informal
:
frío como una piedra
- The chocolate is stone cold; her mouth is sour.
- a stone cold killer
Examples
-
I touched him, he was stone-cold dead!
-
Right, you men, up you get, before everything on the table is stone cold.
-
"Then you make a left," he was saying, his voice stone cold dead, and I had no choice but to wait him out.
Fiction book (1999) -
They sat there stone cold, no smile, no applause.
-
T-t... it's stone cold.
-
Please eat your food quickly before it becomes stone cold.
-
The soup was stone cold after sitting on the counter for hours.
-
He left the coffee on the table, and now it is stone cold.
Synonyms
89
1.0
Very cold with surfaces covered in ice
34
1.0
Very cold, like frozen water
30
4.1
Very cold, like ice or freezing air
15
1.3
Very cold, at or below freezing
5
7.0
Very cold or scary
1
4.1
Very cold with no warmth left
1
9.9
Very cold in a way that feels unpleasant
1
9.9
People say this to mean very cold in a joking, exaggerated way
Very cold in behavior, showing no warmth or friendliness
Antonyms
How Cold
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning 'completely cold' is partly derivable from the constituents because 'cold' carries the core temperature sense and 'stone' here functions as a metaphorical intensifier (as in 'stone-dead'). However, the intensifying use of 'stone' is figurative and may not be immediately obvious to a B1 learner who only knows the literal noun, so the relation is partially clear but not fully predictable without exposure.
Etymology
Stone cold comes from the simple picture of a hard stone that stays very cold to the touch, so people used stone to mean 'completely'. That's why stone cold means 'not warm at all'.