English Explanatory Dictionary

give someone the cold shoulder

English dictionary entry

Meanings

verb
  1. To snub, resist or reject somebody; to regard somebody distantly.

Pronunciation

en-au-give someone the cold shoulder.ogg

Word forms

give someone the cold shoulder gives someone the cold shoulder giving someone the cold shoulder gave someone the cold shoulder given someone the cold shoulder

Etymology

First recorded use of the expression was in 1816 by Sir Walter Scott in Scots (“The Countess’s dislike didna gang farther at first than just showing o’ the cauld shouther”.) This expression and its German equivalent are mistranslations of dederunt umerum recedentem from the Book of Nehemiah 9:29 from the Vulgate Bible, which actually means "stubbornly they turned their backs on you", which comes from the Septuagint Bible's equivalent ἔδωκαν (édōkan) νῶτον ἀπειθοῦντα. Latin umerus means both "shoulder" and "back".

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
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