shrill

"I heard a girl behind me… a shrill shriek. I turned and there was a huge, huge fin behind her. It was massive," she told Nine Network's 60 Minutes.

From BBC ● Aug. 31, 2026

When a shrill roar cut across the train yard a few seconds later, Bartlett promptly broke into tears.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 21, 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

And hearing it was like hearing the world's longest whistle blow, shrill, shredding his eardrums.

From "Look Both Ways" by Jason Reynolds

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

The tone of public debate in Germany has become shriller over the past two years with the influx of hundreds of thousands of migrants.

From Time ● Jan. 1, 2017

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

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

Then, in a little, breaks out the shrillest in solo again, and so they continue till they weary.

From The Three Mulla-mulgars by Walter De la Mare

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

As Olivier pauses, the cobwebbed telephone shrills like a police siren in the silence; scene and story reach their star-shell denouement.

From Time Magazine Archive

The fox shrills for freedom from its cage, where it is held because of the value of its fur.

From Time Magazine Archive

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

"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

“The man we saw on the ground probably lagged behind the other workers and didn’t hear the foreman tell them to stop. He might have worked all night, getting thirstier and thirstier—” “Stop!” shrilled Matt.

From "The House of the Scorpion" by Nancy Farmer

Thus was born the Nightingale of Samarkand, who was lowered in a cage during the bed scene while shrilling an insane modal tune to keep the Princess awake.

From New York Times ● Aug. 9, 2022

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

‘Yankee Doodle’ filled the darkness as the eerie shrilling of the hylas fill black swamps in spring.

From "Johnny Tremain" by Esther Hoskins Forbes