cold day in Hell
- idiom
- Informal
:
un día frío en el infierno
- Seeing him admit he was wrong is a cold day in Hell.
Because it was going to be a cold day in hell before China could build a better car engine than Porsche or Toyota or or even AUS one, right?
- Because it was going to be a cold day in hell before China could build a better car engine than Porsche or Toyota or or even AUS one, right?
- That will literally never a cold day in hell.
Examples
-
It will be a cold day in Hell before I trust him again.
-
Because it was going to be a cold day in hell before China could build a better car engine than Porsche or Toyota or or even AUS one, right?
-
The team's success seemed a cold day in Hell given their recent performance.
Synonyms
1
9.5
For a very long time, often to say something will never happen
An almost impossible chance of happening
Surface Forms
Morphology
The literal meanings of 'cold', 'day', 'in' and 'Hell' are clear, and the contradiction between 'cold' and the culturally expected heat of Hell can signal impossibility to a learner. However, this is a conventional idiom relying on cultural knowledge and figurative inference rather than straightforward compositional meaning, so while its sense (extremely unlikely) can sometimes be guessed, it is not fully predictable for a B1 learner without prior exposure.
Etymology
Cold day in Hell uses the sharp image of Hell—a place thought to be always hot—so a cold day there would be impossible, and that picture makes the phrase memorable. So people say it to mean 'something is extremely unlikely' or 'will never happen'.