Give the cold shoulder Informal

To deliberately ignore someone or treat them with cold indifference, especially as a way of expressing displeasure or rejection.

The unfriendliness is usually pointed and noticeable — meant to be felt by the other person as a clear, if silent, message.

A popular story claims the phrase comes from medieval hosts serving unwelcome guests a cold shoulder of mutton instead of a hot meal, but this is a well-documented folk etymology with no supporting historical evidence — language historians note the phrase is purely literary in origin, first recorded in Sir Walter Scott’s 1816 novel “The Antiquary,” where a character gives someone “the cauld shouther.” Scott used it again in his 1824 novel “St Ronan’s Well,” and given his immense popularity at the time, his writing likely either coined the expression or popularized a previously obscure regional Scottish saying; it then spread through the works of Dickens, the Brontës, and other 19th-century novelists. The image itself is physical and gestural rather than culinary — a dismissive half-turn of the shoulder to visibly signal rejection — and the later phrase “cold shoulder of mutton” was in fact coined as a pun derived from the idiom, not the other way around, meaning the meat story has the causation backwards.

She gave him the cold shoulder after the argument.

Ever since the meeting, my coworker has been giving me the cold shoulder.

He gave the cold shoulder to anyone who disagreed with him.

A: “Why is she avoiding you?” B: “I don’t know, she’s been giving me the cold shoulder all week.”