shrill

Mr. Hernández, a “Saturday Night Live” cast member, is particularly shrill as the best man who can’t forgive his pal for getting married.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 24, 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 sound of a horse’s shrill whinny on the street below drifted in through an open window, but no breeze.

From "The Detective's Assistant" by Kate Hannigan

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

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

Little Arliss’s second scream, when it came, was louder and shriller and more frantic-sounding than the first.

From "Old Yeller" by Fred Gipson

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

In the midst of crisis, the shrillest pitch of crisis in its history, the U.N. focused the world's attention.

From Time Magazine Archive

Vixen blindfolded him, asked him the usual question about his father's stable, and then sent him spinning amongst the moss-grown beeches, groping his way fearfully, with outstretched arms, amidst shrillest laughter and noisest delight.

From Vixen, Volume I. by Braddon, M. E. (Mary Elizabeth)

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

Holding the other at bay with a sword cane, Cadell shrills a police whistle as the curtain falls.

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

Five days later, a newscaster shrills that Paris has fallen to the Germans, and the German people are overjoyed to see the Nazi flag hoisted over France.

From "The Boy Who Dared" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti

"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

“What is it then?” shrilled a woman’s voice.

From "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" by Elizabeth George Speare

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 Kino’s hand had closed tightly on the pearl again, and he was glancing about suspiciously, for the evil song was in his ears, shrilling against the music of the pearl.

From "The Pearl" by John Steinbeck