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.
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“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
That shrill, high-pitched squeal you’ve been hearing lately?
From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 8, 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
“I know James isn’t going to take the impression in a more self-righteous or shrill direction,” he says—not because “SNL” is playing things safe, but because the bit simply wouldn’t be as funny.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 3, 2025
Not a funny laugh at all—but warriors’ shrill I-defeated-you laugh.
From "Black Brother, Black Brother" by Jewell Parker Rhodes
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
Over this period, the political discourse also became shriller.
From BBC ● Nov. 2, 2017
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 a little while before Harry became aware that the voices of Katie Bell and her friend, which were being carried back to him on the wind, had become shriller and louder.
From "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" by J.K. Rowling
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
"Marry?" cried Miss Million in her shrillest Putney-kitchen voice.
From Miss Million's Maid A Romance of Love and Fortune by Onions, Mrs. Oliver
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
The fox shrills for freedom from its cage, where it is held because of the value of its fur.
From Time Magazine Archive
Holding the other at bay with a sword cane, Cadell shrills a police whistle as the curtain falls.
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
“There’ll never be another like him,” she shrilled when she recovered.
From The Guardian ● Mar. 5, 2016
The biometer shrilled again: temperature 102.5 and climbing.
From Nature ● Jun. 29, 2011
His heart beat out a heavy rhythm and the melody of the maybe pearl shrilled in his ears.
From "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck
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
The heavy dragon marched on its thousands of feet, and now above the drums came the shrilling of the fifes.
From "Johnny Tremain" by Esther Hoskins Forbes
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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