shrill
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The trust said this included dingy skipper, which is a small moth-like butterfly, and the shrill carder bumblebee, which was only found in two areas in England.
From BBC ● Sep. 15, 2026
Mr. Hernández, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, is particularly shrill as the best man who can’t forgive his pal for getting married.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 2026
Within a few minutes, we’d hear the soft bubbling of everything cooking together, followed by a shrill whistle, letting us know that it was time to eat.
From Salon ● Jun. 7, 2026
“My grandmother was a sharecropper in Arkansas, and I know that this is the same thing,” a man shouts at one point as whistles shrill and a handheld siren wails.
From Slate ● Feb. 11, 2026
The shrill voice of Helen, a narrower edition of her mother, and Nancy, her horrid little child.
From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier
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Ethan Hawke registers in a much lower key, which counterbalances Amanda’s shriller moments.
From Salon ● Dec. 8, 2023
"We are seeing the rhetoric on topics like migration get shriller," said Stefan Marschall, political scientist at the University of Duesseldorf.
From Reuters ● Jun. 7, 2023
Three decades on, the tone has become shriller.
From BBC ● Aug. 7, 2022
Where the EP gave it Plant’s rich tenor core, the album leaves him shriller and scratchier, closer to Vince Neil of Mötley Crüe or Geddy Lee of Rush.
From New York Times ● Oct. 17, 2018
It was like the whistling of a piccolo many times magnified—shrill and shriller till it keened with the terror of a lost soul and filled the room with the piercingness of itself.
From "I, Robot" by Isaac Asimov
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His half-sublimated wranglings with race are more complex and fraught than either his shrillest detractors or his most fawning defenders would have us believe.
From Salon ● May 30, 2012
Pick: Giants Jets at Bills Line: Jets by 5 1/2 The Jets have joined the Chargers and the Cowboys as one of the league’s shrillest teams.
From New York Times ● Oct. 1, 2010
“It’s a big test for the leadership. We cannot listen to the loudest, shrillest voices in our party,” said Rep. Charlie Dent, a moderate Republican who represents the Philadelphia suburbs.
From Washington Post
The shrillest voice raised was that of Jennie Lee, onetime M.P. and wife of Labor M.P.
From Time Magazine Archive
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The shrillest pipe man ever played Was making music overhead, And in a circle, down below, Sat men whose faces seemed to show Another world was all their trade.
From A Trip to the Orient The Story of a Mediterranean Cruise by Robert Urie Jacob
Binoche is superbly entertaining as she first trills and shrills on the ways of proper womanhood, and then starts to relish the taste of new freedoms, like wearing trousers.
From New York Times ● May 5, 2023
Now his dog barks, the phone shrills and the laughter of chorus girls taunts him; yet he can’t make a sound.
From Time ● Dec. 27, 2011
Holding the other at bay with a sword cane, Cadell shrills a police whistle as the curtain falls.
From Time Magazine Archive
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Classically trained, Ponty wails, shrills and sails through Hypomode de Sol, The Name of the Game and Scarborough Fair-Canticle.
From Time Magazine Archive
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When Aunty Ifeoma woke me up, the room was dim and the shrills of the night crickets were dying away.
From "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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"Prepare for a hard landing," Deutsche Bank shrilled in a Wednesday report.
From Reuters ● Apr. 21, 2022
Magnets, magnets! shrilled my landlady, when I got back from weeks of doing what I was doing.
From The New Yorker ● Oct. 21, 2019
"Oh, won't somebody please think of the style?" they shrilled, arms out-stretched and tears in their eyes.
From The Guardian ● Dec. 16, 2012
The biometer shrilled again: temperature 102.5 and climbing.
From Nature ● Jun. 29, 2011
Neighbors were running, shouting words that Olanna could not understand because the stubborn searing sound had shrilled its way into her head.
From "Half of a Yellow Sun" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
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A feeling like alarm bells shrilling in an empty building, no one to turn the alarm off, no one to respond.
From Slate ● Aug. 27, 2020
Across social media, people are shrilling with outrage over the noise.
From Washington Times ● Jul. 2, 2020
Anyone who has thrilled to the shrilling of cicadas or marvelled at the bizarre behaviour of praying mantises will be entranced by this homage to the class Insecta.
From Nature ● Dec. 4, 2018
On the hill, a breeze stirred the tall cypresses; swallows darted, shrilling, in the great bowl of light below them.
From The New Yorker ● Sep. 10, 2018
But the music of the pearl was shrilling with triumph in Kino.
From "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck
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Vocabulary lists containing shrill
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
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List 5
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"Easter, 1916" by W.B. Yeats
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