Meaning
In a state of exclusion or neglect, cut off from a group, an activity or information that others share; used as a noun phrase, as in being kept or left out in the cold. It stresses the condition of the excluded person, while the longer verbal form stresses the act of excluding. Neutral to sympathetic; common in reporting on politics, sport and business exclusion. Regional use: General English.
Origin
This noun-phrase use grows out of the longer verbal idiom 'leave someone out in the cold', whose image is a person shut outside in freezing weather while others are warm indoors; dictionaries treat the two as one expression. The earliest dated quotations for the family, from 1902 (Housman) and 1906 (Ward, on leaving both Saxony and Bavaria out in the cold), appear under that longer form, and American idiom guides date it to the early 1800s without printing citations, so the verifiable record begins in the early twentieth century. John le Carre's famous reversal, the title about the spy who came in from the cold, shows how productive the image became in the 1960s.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- be out in the cold
- kept out in the cold
- leave someone out in the cold
- left out in the cold
Usage Examples
- Latecomers to the rollout found themselves out in the cold, with no access to the pilot software.
- He spent a decade out in the cold after quarrelling with the gallery's owner.
- Without a seat on the committee, the union stays out in the cold when the schedules are set.