screech
[skɹit͡ʃ]
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 2.88 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
7
Letters
1
Syllables
5
Unique Chars
Meaning
Example Sentences
- "“Before he was a twel’month ould he had a mouth full o’ great teeth; his hands wor like ’s claws, and his legs wor no thicker nor the handle of a whip, and about as straight as a rapin’ hook; to make the matther worse, he had the gut uv a cormorant, and the whinge, and the yelp, and the screech, and the yowl, was never out of his mouth.”"
- "That the night owl should screech before the noonday sun, that the bat should wheel around the bad of beauty […]"
- ""Have you not met them?" "No, I have met nothing but three cormorants, which were sitting on a bit of drift-wood screeching.""
- "They said he had caused the fire in some way; be that as it may, he was screeching most horribly."
- "The tide was out, and we drew up amid the strong bracing smell of seaweed, with gulls screeching, wheeling around, and gliding on the wind."
- "AS THE residents of the quiet Midlothian housing estate prepared for the day ahead, the early-morning stillness was disturbed by the sound of screeching brakes and slamming doors."
Etymology
1602; altered with expressive vowel lengthening from earlier skrech (1577), variant of obsolete scritch, from Middle English skriken, shrichen, schrichen (1250), from Old English (attested as scriccettan) and Old Norse skríkja, both from Proto-Germanic *skrīkijaną (compare Icelandic skríkja, Old Saxon scricōn, Danish skrige, Swedish skrika), derivative of *skrīhaną (compare Middle Dutch schriën, German schreien, Low German dial. schrien, schriegen), ultimately of imitative origin.
Origin
Word Breakdown
- Root: skriken, -, skríkja, *skrīkijaną
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: [skɹit͡ʃ]
- British English: [skɹiːt͡ʃ]
Usage
Inflected Forms
Derived Forms
Phrases
screech bird
screech hawk
screech-in
screech martin
screech owl
screech thrush
screech tunnel
Cambondo screeching frog