cold shoulder

1. 1.

   a refusal to recognize someone you know

   “the snub was clearly intentional”

   Synonymssnubcut

   Broaderrebuff

Questions about cold shoulder

What does cold shoulder mean?

cold shoulder means "a refusal to recognize someone you know".

What is another word for cold shoulder?

Close synonyms include snub, cut. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is cold shoulder a common word?

cold shoulder 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.