chilled to the bone

Very  cold  indeed. This  hyperbole  for  feeling  cold replaces  the  older  idea  of  one’s  blood  freezing. Thus  Shakespeare  wrote  of Pericles, after he was shipwrecked, “A man throng’d up with chill; my veins are cold” (Pericles, 2.1). This thought persisted well into the nineteenth cen- tury, appearing in poems by Tennyson (“Till her blood was frozen slowly,” in “The  Lady  of  Shalott”)  and  Lawrence  Binyon  (“In  the  terrible  hour  of  the dawn, when the veins are cold,” in Edith Cavell).