If you do something coldly, you do it with no warm feeling — no kindness in the voice, no softness in the face. It is not about the weather. A person can speak coldly, look at you coldly, or turn you down coldly; the other person often feels shut out, as if they do not matter. It is a little more formal than just calling someone “cold,” and stories and news use it a lot. You can also use it for hard choices: a boss who fires people coldly does the job as if feelings are not in the room. Though actually, people sometimes say coldly when they only mean “calmly, with no drama” — a doctor naming a fact coldly may not be unkind, just not wrapping it in soft words. The unfriendly reading is still the one you will meet first.