sold meaning (informal): definition, etymology and quotations

sold

adj

UK /səʊld/ · US /soʊld/

Informal Convinced, won over.

I type ‘high cortisol’ into the search bar and keep scrolling. ‘You’re not ugly, you just have cortisol face,’ declares one video. ‘POV you finally drop the cortisol belly,’ reads another. A third screams in caps lock, ‘HOW TO LOWER CORTISOL’. I’m sold. Cortisol is to blame for everything. But how do I fix it?2026 March 20, Brit Dawson, “‘I went on a cortisol ‘detox’ to tackle my spiralling anxiety — here’s what happened’”, in Cosmopolitan:

sold

noun

Etymology From Middle English solde, sould, soud, from Middle French solde, Italian soldo. Compare soldier and Danish sold (via Low German). Doublet of sol, soldo, solid, solidus, sou, and xu.

Obsolete salary; military pay

But were your will her sold to entertaine1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto IX”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:
Lying in campe under sold and pay, fighting as souldiers.1601, William Barlow, A Defense of the Articles of the Protestant Religion in answer to a libell lately cast abroad:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.