cold comfort

1. 1.

   very limited consolation or empathy

   “he told me that time heals all wounds but that was cold comfort to me”

   Broaderconsolation

Questions about cold comfort

What does cold comfort mean?

cold comfort means "very limited consolation or empathy".

Is cold comfort a common word?

cold comfort is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.