cool
adjective
- 1of or at a fairly low temperature: it’ll be a cool afternoon the wind kept them cool
- soothing or refreshing because of its low temperature: a long, cool glass of orange juice
- (especially of clothing) keeping one from becoming too hot: a cool cotton dress
- (of a colour) containing pale blue, green, or grey tones: the bathroom was all glass and cool, muted blues
- 2showing no friendliness towards a person or enthusiasm for an idea or project: he gave a cool reception to the suggestion for a research centre
- free from excitement, anxiety, or excessive emotion: he prided himself on keeping a cool head she seems cool, calm, and collected
- (of jazz) restrained and relaxed.
- 3 informal fashionably attractive or impressive: youngsters are turning to smoking because they think it makes them appear cool
- excellent:
- used to express acceptance of or agreement with something: if people want to freak out at our clubs, that’s cool I told Bill that I was going to write the final draft of the script and he was cool with that
noun
verb
- become or make less hot:
- become or make calm or less excited:
-
Phrases
-
cool it!
- informal behave in a less excitable manner: cool it and tell me why you’re so ecstatic
-
cool one's heels
- see heel1
-
keep (or lose) one's cool
- informal maintain (or fail to maintain) a calm and controlled attitude: he finally lost his cool with a photographer and threatened to hit him
-
too cool for school
informal - very cool or fashionable: he has no brains, no looks, no personality, but he still thinks he’s too cool for school
Origin:
Old English cōl (noun), cōlian (verb), of Germanic origin; related to Dutch koel, also to cold
Word Trends
Cool hasn’t just meant ‘chilly’ since the 1920s, when it started being used by black Americans to describe someone or something fashionable, stylish, and impressive. This sense became more widely known in the 1940s, with the popularity of jazz and beatnik culture, and was then particularly ‘cool’ in the 1960s. As is often the fate of popular slang, the word itself became ‘uncool’ for a couple of decades, before reclaiming its place as a favourite way of expressing positive feelings ( there’s a lot of cool stuff happening in Manchester winning awards is such a cool thing) or agreement ( if you want to use mine, that’s cool).The Oxford English Corpus shows that this use is now just as common as the word’s original sense of ‘at a fairly low temperature’. See also stuff (wordTrends)