Other forms: whistles, whistled, whistling
A whistle is the small thing you blow to make one hard, high sound that cuts through everything else. The referee's whistle that stops the game, the plastic one clipped to a child's coat, the whistle at the end of a shift.
The t is silent — say it WISS-ul — and the same goes for whistled and whistling. It is a verb as much as a noun: you whistle a tune while you wash up, whistle for the dog, and the kettle whistles when it boils. Wind whistles through a gap in a window, and a train whistles at a crossing. Two phrases carry it a long way from the object: blow the whistle on someone means report what they are doing wrong, which is where whistle-blower comes from, and clean as a whistle means nothing wrong was found at all.
1nounwhistleA small object you blow through to make a sharp, high sound.~62%
“The referee's whistle went before the ball crossed the line.”
2verbairTo make a high sound by blowing air through your lips.~19%
“He whistled all the way down the stairs.”
3nounrailThe sound itself, whether it comes from a person, a kettle, an engine or the wind.~17%
“A long whistle came from the far end of the platform.”
4verbmachineOf a machine or the wind, to make that sound.~2%
“The kettle whistles when the water boils.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 124 sentences found in the wild and placed 68 of them on a sense (56 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
The verb is Old English hwistlan, and behind it a Proto-Germanic word that meant to make a hissing sound. Icelandic kept the same root for hvísla, to whisper — the quiet end of the same breath.
Old English
hwistle
Middle English
whistel
English, today
whistle
From Middle English whistel, whistil, whistle, from Old English hwistle, from the verb (see below).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA