skirl

Belief swirled like the skirl of the bagpipes.

From BBC ● Nov. 8, 2025

Bringing Scotland to the Pacific Northwest for over 75 years through the skirl o’ the Pipes and Drums, the beauty of Highland Dancing, the brawn of Scottish athletics, and the sharing of clan history!

From Seattle Times ● Apr. 26, 2024

"It had all the strange, wild, emotional force of the skirl of a bagpipe," wrote Herbert Warren Wind.

From Golf Digest ● Apr. 13, 2020

The skirl got to 14-year-old Paul-Luc Parks when he was 7.

From Washington Times ● Jan. 31, 2017

Voices would skirl up in the darkness: one person singing a lullaby, then another person, until everyone was asleep.

From "1491" by Charles C. Mann

Its unnerving drones and belligerent skirls have been known to stir men's blood, their brains and, according to Shakespeare, their bladders.*

From Time Magazine Archive

It went on and on and on, never faltering, never pausing, in soft trills and gay roulades, shrill skirls or flute-like warblings, a continuous outpour, for I don't know how many minutes.

From The Lady Paramount by Henry Harland

"But she threeps to keep on a black fause-face, and skirls if we offer to take it away."

From The Surgeon's Daughter by Sir Walter Scott

“I heard the voice of that lad Andrew Lammie; can the chield be drowning that he skirls sae uncannily?” said the old woman, seating herself on the ground, and looking earnestly at the water. 

From Folk-Lore and Legends Scotland by Anonymous

"I heard the voice of that lad Andrew Lammie; can the chield be drowning, that he skirls sae uncannilie?" said the old woman, seating herself on the ground, and looking earnestly at the water.

From Stories of Mystery by Rossiter Johnson

Then the bagpipes skirled, and the coffin was loaded into the hearse and borne away for a private burial.

From New York Times ● Nov. 3, 2014

A bagpiper skirled "Amazing Grace," wreaths were laid and a bugler played "Taps."

From Reuters ● Jun. 6, 2014

After tea, the Queen Mother and Margaret went ashore, and the Britannia set course for the Mediterranean, with the children beaming at the rail while bagpipes skirled on the pier.

From Time Magazine Archive

A day's mail may even bring a poem penned by a Scottish millworker: A proven champion of the world, O'er tricky tracks you've screeched and skirled.

From Time Magazine Archive

Now the darkness was closing in on his family; now the evil music filled the night, hung over the mangroves, skirled in the wave beat.

From "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck

Two minutes later John McGinn smashed a shot on to the Chelsea bar from 30 yards, the rebound sending the ball skirling up a similar distance into the London sky.

From The Guardian ● Dec. 28, 2020

He turned Ms. Nicks’s “Gold Dust Woman” into a darker incantation before taking a long, skirling, keening solo in his own “I’m So Afraid”; “Tusk” was a cry of despair, not a novelty.

From New York Times ● Oct. 7, 2014

Distinct from the lilting singsong of the South, a Northern Irish accent is my favorite in the U.K.: hard, skirling, and sour, with a compulsively upward, interrogative lift at the end of the sentence.

From Newsweek ● Jul. 11, 2011

But there is still something magnificent – and magnificently out-of-kilter – about this great skirling tide of productivity.

From The Guardian ● Jun. 23, 2010

She listened to the skirling of the wind and the scuffling sound of leather on stone.

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