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 also got to Lily Cunningham, a pixie of a 13-year-old who stood beside the evening’s emcee, Arthur McAra, clutching her three-quarter-sized bagpipe.

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

"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

I ran to the spot I heard the skirls comin' from, and there I found Mr. Charles, lyin' as if dead, and Grace Davoren with her hands clasped like a mad woman over him.

From The Evil Eye; Or, The Black Spector The Works of William Carleton, Volume One by William Carleton

There was a layer of blue smoke above their heads that broke into skirls as various individuals left one group to join another.

From The Fourth R by George Oliver Smith

And the whispering grass on the gay green hills And every cricket that skirls and shrills, And every moonbeam, gleaming white, All know the Glugs quite well by sight.

From The Glugs of Gosh by C. J. (Clarence James) Dennis

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

On the dock, a bagpiper skirled the melancholy tune of The Minstrel Boy.

From Time Magazine Archive

Then, while a pipe band skirled The Hundred Pipers and onlookers showered them with rose petals, the first of 90,000 Pakistani prisoners, held in India since the 1971 war, stepped across the border to freedom.

From Time Magazine Archive

“Last dance!” someone called, and the music skirled up into something stately and slow and final.

From "The Graveyard Book" by Neil Gaiman

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

Even the wind seemed to whistle with derision as it came skirling through the Moon Door.

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