Shrill means unpleasantly high and sharp in sound. A shrill whistle, shrill voices, shrill and insistent.
The unpleasantness is built in — nothing is shrill and welcome — and the sound is high and piercing rather than merely loud. Applied to argument it means strident and over-insistent, and that use is levelled at women far more often than men, which is worth knowing before reaching for it. Note shrillness, shrilly.
1adjectiveshrillUnpleasantly high and sharp in sound.
“The shrill whistle of the kettle woke the whole house.”
shrill is a quality of sound.
Middle English schrille is related to an Old English word meaning sonorous. It is probably imitative of the sound.
Old English
sċill — sonorous sounding
Middle English
schrille
English, today
shrill
Built from
From Late Middle English schrille, shirle, shrille (“of a sound: high-pitched, piercing; producing such a sound”), possibly from the earlier shil, schille (“loud, resounding; high-pitched”), from Old English sċill (“sonorous sounding”), of Germanic origin and probably ultimately imitative of the sound. The r in the word was introduced by analogy to Middle English skrīke, skrīken, scrēmen, possibly to avoid confusion with non-Anglian forms of schelle (modern English shell) where Old English sċill (“sonorous sounding”) and sċill (“shell”) existed. The word is cognate with Icelandic skella (“crash, bang, slam”), Low German schrell (“sharp in taste or tone”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA