shrill

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

“It’s like, every second word somebody’s doing a shrill horrible laugh,” he said, “and it’s nonstop through the entire piece.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● May 8, 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

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

They were playing the riau-riau music, the pipes shrill and the drums pounding, and behind them came the men and boys dancing.

From "The Sun Also Rises" by Ernest Hemingway

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

Her song grew louder, shriller . . . then she gasped, again and again, and her song became a shuddering wail, thin and high and full of agony.

From "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin

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

Easily the most visible figure on the political scene was Mao's wife Chiang Ching, the onetime movie actress who became the shrillest voice of the Cultural Revolution.

From Time Magazine Archive

It seemed as though all the loud music of the town band had struck up at the moment with their shrillest notes.

From The Fixed Period by Anthony Trollope

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

Classically trained, Ponty wails, shrills and sails through Hypomode de Sol, The Name of the Game and Scarborough Fair-Canticle.

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

“Yii!” shrilled Rita, but no words came out.

From "The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm" 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

The crickets seemed to take up the conversation then; their loud shrilling seemed so close, although they well might have been miles away.

From "Purple Hibiscus" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie