leave someone out in the cold
/ˈliv ˌsʌmwʌn aʊt ən ðə ˈkoʊld/
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.77 in modern English
35
Scrabble Score
24
Letters
2
Syllables
14
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write this is a horse under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there, not to hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your door to it; leave it out in the cold."
- "There was as yet no question of his [Albrecht von Wallenstein's] abandoning the Emperor [Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor], but he obviously meant to leave both Saxony and Bavaria out in the cold."
- "He [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] promised unemployment insurance—he give^([sic – meaning gives]) us the Wagner-Lewis bill which leaves entirely out in the cold the 17 million now unemployed."
- "While at first in the U.S.A. it may have been a matter of high-pressure salesmanship—and it has undoubtely been the irresistible enterprise of the General Motors Corporation, through its Electro-Motive subsidiary, that has set in motion this amazingly rapid transformation of American railway motive power, and has caused all the steam locomotive builders in the U.S.A. to follow suit or be left out in the cold—it seems now beyond dispute that, so far as the U.S.A. is concerned, the economics of the power question can be solved no other way."
- "Although the settlement used the arguments of antismokers as a background, antismokers themselves were marginalized on account of their own long-standing prohibitionist policies. [...] Short of leaving themselves out in the cold and irrelevant, antismokers had no choice but to join as the lesser partners at the settlement table."
- "[H]e might have been looking for an excuse to cover his ass and leave the boy out in the cold."
Etymology
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈliv ˌsʌmwʌn aʊt ən ðə ˈkoʊld/
- British English: /ˈliːv ˌsʌmwʌn aʊt ɪn ðə ˈkɔʊld/