shrill

“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

It draws on another 21st-century innovation: the rise of shrill reality TV like "The Apprentice."

From Salon ● May 23, 2025

The inevitable pause, the glance at the watch unnecessary, as her drawing-room clock chimed four in shrill tones, and my rise from the chair.

From "Rebecca" by Daphne du Maurier

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

“Oh, you wicked man!” she howled, in a voice just a little shriller than normal.

From "The Inquisitor's Tale" by Adam Gidwitz

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

So," she says, in her shrillest voice, "It's you, is it?

From The Diamond Coterie by Lynch, Lawrence L.

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 what Broadway saw last week was a story which, though it lacks tremolo, shrills along as vibrant and masculine as a trumpet call.

From Time Magazine Archive

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

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

"If Balotelli's price comes down then I'll get over to Manchester immediately," shrilled vice-president Adriano Galliani.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 21, 2013

The biometer shrilled again: temperature 102.5 and climbing.

From Nature ● Jun. 29, 2011

“I’ve given you your chance,” shrilled the man in the yellow suit, “and you’ve refused it.”

From "Tuck Everlasting" by Natalie Babbit

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

But the music of the pearl was shrilling with triumph in Kino.

From "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck