Meaning
Excluded from a group, activity, benefit or piece of news, and made to feel ignored or forgotten; the omission is done to the person, typically by a group, an employer or a family, rather than chosen by them. Neutral register with a strong sympathy bias toward the excluded person. Regional use: General English.
Origin
The image needs no explanation: a person left outdoors in wintry weather while others are warm inside. Wiktionary's entry for the verbal form 'leave someone out in the cold' defines it exactly that way and prints dated quotations from 1902 (Laurence Housman's introduction to Gammer Grethel's Fairy Tales) and 1906 (A. W. Ward writing of leaving 'both Saxony and Bavaria out in the cold'), with later citations running to the present. Some American idiom guides date the expression to the early 1800s, but they print no supporting citations, so the earliest verifiable evidence is early twentieth century. The shorter noun-phrase form 'out in the cold' is the same idiom, and the reverse image was made famous by le Carre's spy title about coming in from the cold.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be left out in the cold
- kept out in the cold
- leave someone out in the cold
- left standing out in the cold
Usage Examples
- When the merger was announced, front-line staff were left out in the cold while managers received briefings.
- She felt left out in the cold after her two closest colleagues moved to the new project without telling her.
- Smaller suppliers risk being left out in the cold by the retailer's new exclusive deals.