cool
[kool]
adjective, -er, -est, adverb, noun, verb | 1. | moderately cold; neither warm nor cold: a rather cool evening. |
| 2. | feeling comfortably or moderately cold: I'm perfectly cool, but open the window if you feel hot. |
| 3. | imparting a sensation of moderate coldness or comfortable freedom from heat: a cool breeze. |
| 4. | permitting such a sensation: a cool dress. |
| 5. | not excited; calm; composed; under control: to remain cool in the face of disaster. |
| 6. | not hasty; deliberate: a cool and calculated action. |
| 7. | lacking in interest or enthusiasm: a cool reply to an invitation. |
| 8. | lacking in warmth or cordiality: a cool reception. |
| 9. | calmly audacious or impudent: a cool lie. |
| 10. | aloof or unresponsive; indifferent: He was cool to her passionate advances. |
| 11. | unaffected by emotions; disinterested; dispassionate: She made a cool appraisal of all the issues in the dispute. |
| 12. | Informal. (of a number or sum) without exaggeration or qualification: a cool million dollars. |
| 13. | (of colors) with green, blue, or violet predominating. |
| 14. | Slang.
|
| 15. | Informal. coolly. |
| 16. | something that is cool; a cool part, place, time, etc.: in the cool of the evening. |
| 17. | coolness. |
| 18. | calmness; composure; poise: an executive noted for maintaining her cool under pressure. |
| 19. | to become cool (sometimes fol. by down or off): The soup cooled in five minutes. We cooled off in the mountain stream. |
| 20. | to become less ardent, cordial, etc.; become moderate. |
| 21. | to make cool; impart a sensation of coolness to. |
| 22. | to lessen the ardor or intensity of; allay; calm; moderate: Disappointment cooled his early zealousness. |
| 23. | cool down, to bring the body back to its normal physiological level after fast, vigorous exercise or activity by gradually slowing the pace of activity or by doing gentle exercises or stretches. |
| 24. | cool off, Informal. to become calmer or more reasonable: Wait until he cools off before you talk to him again. |
| 25. | cool out, Slang. to calm or settle down; relax: cooling out at the beach. |
| 26. | blow one's cool. blow 2 (def. 43). |
| 27. | cool it, Slang. calm down; take it easy. |
| 28. | cool one's heels. heel 1 (def. 26). |
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
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cool (kōōl) adj. cool·er, cool·est
v. cooled, cool·ing, cools v. tr.
[Middle English cole, from Old English cōl; see gel- in Indo-European roots.] cool'ish adj., cool'ly adv., cool'ness n. Synonyms: These adjectives indicate absence of excitement or discomposure in a person, especially in times of stress. Cool usually implies merely a high degree of self-control, but it may also indicate aloofness: "Keep strong, if possible. In any case, keep cool. Have unlimited patience" (B.H. Liddell Hart). "An honest hater is often a better fellow than a cool friend" (John Stuart Blackie). Our Living Language : The usage of cool as a general positive epithet or interjection has been part and parcel of English slang since World War II, and has even been borrowed into other languages, such as French and German. Originally this sense is a development from a Black English usage meaning "excellent, superlative," first recorded in written English in the early 1930s. Jazz musicians who used the term are responsible for its popularization during the 1940s. As a slang word expressing generally positive sentiment, it has stayed current (and cool) far longer than most such words. One of the main characteristics of slang is the continual renewal of its vocabulary and storehouse of expressions: in order for slang to stay slangy, it has to have a feeling of novelty. Slang expressions meaning the same thing as cool, like bully, capital, hot, groovy, hep, crazy, nervous, far-out, rad, and tubular have for the most part not had the staying power or continued universal appeal of cool. In general there is no intrinsic reason why one word stays alive and others get consigned to the scrapheap of linguistic history; slang terms are like fashion designs, constantly changing and never "in" for long. The jury is still out on how long newer expressions of approval such as def and phat will survive. |
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Cool
Cool\, a. [Compar. Cooler; superl. Coolest.] [AS. c[=o]l; akin to D. koel, G. k["u]hl, OHG. chouli, Dan. k["o]lig, Sw. kylig, also to AS. calan to be cold, Icel. kala. See Cold, and cf. Chill.]1. Moderately cold; between warm and cold; lacking in warmth; producing or promoting coolness. Fanned with cool winds. --Milton. 2. Not ardent, warm, fond, or passionate; not hasty; deliberate; exercising self-control; self-possessed; dispassionate; indifferent; as, a cool lover; a cool debater. For a patriot, too cool. --Goldsmith. 3. Not retaining heat; light; as, a cool dress. 4. Manifesting coldness or dislike; chilling; apathetic; as, a cool manner. 5. Quietly impudent; negligent of propriety in matters of minor importance, either ignorantly or willfully; presuming and selfish; audacious; as, cool behavior. Its cool stare of familiarity was intolerable. --Hawthorne. 6. Applied facetiously, in a vague sense, to a sum of money, commonly as if to give emphasis to the largeness of the amount. He had lost a cool hundred. --Fielding. Leaving a cool thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. --Dickens. Syn: Calm; dispassionate; self-possessed; composed; repulsive; frigid; alienated; impudent.Cool
Cool\, n. A moderate state of cold; coolness; -- said of the temperature of the air between hot and cold; as, the cool of the day; the cool of the morning or evening.Cool
Cool\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Cooled; p. pr. & vb. n. Cooling.]1. To make cool or cold; to reduce the temperature of; as, ice cools water. Send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue. --Luke xvi. 24. 2. To moderate the heat or excitement of; to allay, as passion of any kind; to calm; to moderate. We have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts. --Shak. To cool the heels, to dance attendance; to wait, as for admission to a patron's house. [Colloq.] --Dryden.Cool
Cool\, v. i. 1. To become less hot; to lose heat. I saw a smith stand with his hammer, thus, the whilst his iron did on the anvil cool. --Shak. 2. To lose the heat of excitement or passion; to become more moderate. I will not give myself liberty to think, lest I should cool. --Congreve.Cite This Source
cool
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Main Entry: cool
Function: intransitive verb
: to lose passion : become calm —sometimes used with off or down
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COOL
1. Concurrent Object-Oriented Language.
2. CLIPS Object-Oriented Language?
3. A C++ class library developed at Texas Instruments that defines containers like Vectors, List, Hash_Table, etc. It uses a shallow hierarchy with no common base class. The functionality is close to Common Lisp data structures (like libg++). The template syntax is very close to Cfront 3.x and g++ 2.x.
JCOOL's main difference from COOL and GECOOL is that it uses real C++ templates instead of a similar syntax that is preprocessed by a special 'cpp' distributed with COOL and GECOOL.
(ftp://csc.ti.com/pub/COOL.tar.Z).
GECOOL, JCOOL: (ftp://cs.utexas.edu/pub/COOL/).
E-mail: Van-Duc Nguyen
(1992-08-05)
CooL language
Combined object-oriented Language.
An object-oriented language from the ITHACA Esprit project, which combines C-based languages with database technology.
(1995-03-15)
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cool
In addition to the idioms beginning with cool, also see keep cool; keep one's cool; play it cool.
Copyright © 1997. Published by Houghton Mifflin.
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