Other forms: chilling, chilled, chills
To chill something is to make it cold without freezing it. Chill the wine, chill for two hours, serve chilled.
In cooking, chilling and freezing are different steps and recipes are careful about which they mean. The noun is a feeling of cold — there is a chill in the air — or a shiver of fear: it sent a chill down my spine. Informally, chill and chill out mean to relax, and chilled describes a calm person. Note windchill, the temperature it feels like once the wind is added, and chilling as an adjective, meaning frightening.
1verbchillTo make something cold without freezing it.
“Chill the dough for an hour before you roll it.”
Patternchill + noun (wine, dough, dessert) · chill for + time · well chilled · serve chilled · chilled water
2nounfeelingA feeling of cold.
“There was a chill in the air by five o'clock.”
3verbrelaxTo relax.
“They spent the whole afternoon chilling by the river.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
chill is coldness, or a way of relaxing.
cHILL → a HILL of ice for the drinks
Before the guests come, the bottles sit in a hill of ice to chill — cold, but not frozen.
hooks ontohill
Old English ciele meant cold, from a Proto-Indo-European root that also gives Latin gelu and so English gelid, gelatin and congeal. Cold and cool are its close English cousins, all from the same source.
Proto-Indo-European
*gel- — to be cold
Proto-Germanic
*kaliz
Proto-West Germanic
*kali
Old English
ċiele
Middle English
chele
English, today
chill
Built from
From Middle English chele, chile, from Old English ċiele, ċele (“cold; coldness”), from Proto-West Germanic kali, from Proto-Germanic kaliz, from Proto-Indo-European gel- (“to be cold”). Closely related with Dutch kil. Also akin to cool, cold, gel, and congeal, which see.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA