Meaning
In a state of fear, dread or acute anxiety that sets off the body's clammy alarm: perspiring while feeling chilled at the same time. The phrase describes someone gripped by terror or dread - he waited for the verdict in a cold sweat - and to wake up in a cold sweat names the panicked jolt out of a nightmare. The same physiology accompanies shock, pain, fever and faintness. Break out in a cold sweat is the most common verbal frame and in a cold sweat the state. Medical writers note cold sweats also accompany shock, low blood sugar and heart attack, so the idiom has a literal clinical cousin. Regional use: Global English.
Origin
The noun is much older than the idiom: Merriam-Webster dates cold sweat to 1582, defining it as concurrent perspiration and chill usually associated with fear, pain or shock - verified on the archived entry. The full idiom is later: Ammer's American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms dates in a cold sweat to the late 1700s, and Wiktionary's earliest quotation for the noun is Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798): 'The cold sweat melted from their limbs'. The paradox is physiological: acute fear triggers the fight-or-flight response, blood is drawn away from the skin, and evaporating sweat leaves the skin feeling cold. Collins COBUILD documents the common extensions wake up in a cold sweat, come out in a cold sweat and the shorter in a sweat.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- break out in a cold sweat
- come out in a cold sweat
- wake up in a cold sweat
Usage Examples
- The night before the results came out, he lay in a cold sweat imagining every possible outcome.
- She woke up in a cold sweat after dreaming she had missed her own wedding.
- Just remembering the layoff meeting still brings him out in a cold sweat.