shrill

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

“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

Lopez handed one to Juan Ballena, who immediately used it — a shrill, reedy blast soon answered by others.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 9, 2025

Thatcher was seen as "strange and shrill" when she got the job, but became the party's most successful boss of modern times.

From BBC ● Oct. 4, 2025

The three shrill notes of someone demanding to be let in.

From "Sir Fig Newton and the Science of Persistence" by Sonja Thomas

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

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

Over this period, the political discourse also became shriller.

From BBC ● Nov. 2, 2017

Her voice sounded shriller than usual, but I guess that wasn’t surprising given what she was fighting.

From "The Last Olympian" by Rick Riordan

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

One of the shrillest of the Fundamentalist ideologues in Washington is the Rev. Tim LaHaye, 59, who moved to the capital from San Diego last year.

From Time Magazine Archive

Just as all were happy again, everyone was startled by a rapid succession of the loudest and shrillest shrieks, apparently coming from the room where the baby was asleep.

From Charles Dickens' Children Stories by Charles Dickens

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

But when some world-shaking event takes place, La Prensa's horn shrills and a Prensa office boy trots downtown to pay the fine before its echo has died away.

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

Far away, a stream pattered through reeds, while near at hand bush babies shrilled at the unwelcome presence of Ear, Eye and Arm.

From "The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm" by Nancy Farmer

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