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trill

UK/tɹɪl/US/tɹɪl/
verbC1Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,809 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: trills, trilling, trilled

To trill is to sing with a rapid quivering of notes. The bird trilled, a trilled note, trilling voice.

In music a trill is an exact ornament — a fast alternation between a note and the one above it — and it is written with a small tr over the note. In phonetics a trilled r is one made by vibrating the tongue, as in Spanish. Note that the word came from Italian.

Definitions of trill

  1. 1verbtrillTo sing with a rapid quivering of notes.C1

    “A blackbird trilled from the top of the garden fence.”

trill is a sound.

Where it comes from

Italian trillare means to quaver, made from the sound. Music took the term from Italian along with most of its vocabulary.

  1. Italian

    trillo

  2. Middle English

    trillen

  3. English, today

    trill

From Middle English trillen, from Italian trillo, trillare. Compare German trillern, Norwegian trille, Swedish trilla.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

trill in the wild

  • A cadential trill is a trill associated with each cadence.

    Trill (music)

  • In Italian, a simple trill typically displays only one or two vibrations, while a geminate trill will have three or more.

    Voiced dental and alveolar trills

  • Languages where trills always have multiple vibrations include Albanian, Spanish, Cypriot Greek, and a number of Armenian and Portuguese dialects.

    Voiced dental and alveolar trills

  • Many languages claimed to have a voiceless uvular fricative may actually have a voiceless uvular fricative trill.

    Voiceless uvular fricative

  • However, trills may also be produced with only one contact.

    Trill consonant

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

  • trillion