472
Opinion of the Court
"marked by absence of warm feelings: without consideration, compunction, or clemency," id., at 442, mirrors the definition of "pitiless." The other defines "cold-blooded" to mean "matter of fact, emotionless." Ibid. It is true that "cold-blooded" is sometimes also used to describe "premedita[tion]," Black's Law Dictionary 260 (6th ed. 1990)—a mental state that may coincide with, but is distinct from, a lack of feeling or compassion. But premeditation is clearly not the sense in which the Idaho Supreme Court used the word "cold-blooded" in Osborn. Other terms in the limiting construction—"callous" and "pitiless"—indicate that the court used the word "cold-blooded" in its first sense. "Premedita[tion]," moreover, is specifically addressed elsewhere in the Idaho homicide statutes, Idaho Code § 18- 4003(a) (1987) (amended version at Supp. 1992); had the Osborn court meant premeditation, it likely would have used the statutory language.
In ordinary usage, then, the phrase "cold-blooded, pitiless slayer" refers to a killer who kills without feeling or sympathy. We assume that legislators use words in their ordinary, everyday senses, see, e. g., INS v. Phinpathya, 464 U. S. 183, 189 (1984), and there is no reason to suppose that judges do otherwise. The dissent questions our resort to dictionaries for the common meaning of the word "cold-blooded," post, at 482, but offers no persuasive authority to suggest that the word, in its present context, means anything else.
The Court of Appeals thought the Osborn limiting construction inadequate not because the phrase "cold-blooded, pitiless slayer" lacks meaning, but because it requires the sentencer to make a "subjective determination." We disagree. We are not faced with pejorative adjectives such as "especially heinous, atrocious, or cruel" or "outrageously or wantonly vile, horrible and inhuman"—terms that describe a crime as a whole and that this Court has held to be unconstitutionally vague. See, e. g., Shell v. Mississippi, 498 U. S. 1 (1990) (per curiam); Cartwright, 486 U. S., at 363-364; God-
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