whistle
/ˈwɪs(ə)l
/- The Doc let out a whistle from between his teeth.
- She was about to explain, when a high-pitched whistle from somewhere in the middle of the soldiers sounded.
- The city itself is a spectacle to behold, with dazzling lights, beeps and whistles, and the sound of change going ‘jingle jangle’ all night long.
- A cacophony of booms and whistles and bangs plays around us, and we eat popcorn and watch the sky explode.
- Resident orcas are highly vocal and communicate with a learned repertoire of clicks, whistles and squeals.
- The music is a unique sound of Irish folk ballads, traditional tunes with vocals accompanied by bazouki, bodhran, harmonicas and whistles.
- These include harps, lyres, whistles, horns, pan-pipes, bones, psalteries and some form of drum.
- He whistled through his teeth, a high pitched sound that grated on the human ears.
- And so, Peter Howard strolled back towards the lower engine compartment, cheerfully whistling under his breath.
- The Congresswoman is whistling through her teeth.
- Julius smiled and began whistling an old tune he liked as he walked down one of the many corridors of the colony.
- Michael Grant simply whistled some tunes from the SFA song book.
- He whistled an old song he had memorized and stared at the sea.
- When the kettle began whistling, I turned around to get the hot water for my green tea.
- The kettle began to whistle, and she broke herself out of her reverie and made two mugs of tea.
- The train whistled and slowly began its entrance to the London station.
- The only sound is the wind whistling through the tall pines.
- All you could hear was the wind whistling through the stadium
- I sat there, with the sun beating down on me, the wind whistling in my hair and the sound of a buzzard overhead looking for prey.
- Urs Meier, the Swiss referee, appears to have stopped whistling fouls against either team.
- Referee Karl Kirkpatrick was the dominant figure in the opening exchanges, whistling 13 penalties in the first half before dishing out four yellow cards in the second.
- Referee Brian Crowe started as he meant to go on: whistling for even the slightest indiscretion.
- Some might think that a reunion can be whistled up but it takes time and careful planning to make it a success.
- We sell these world wide to hotels who use them for the concierge to whistle up a taxi!
- Meanwhile Ballina is still whistling for funding for a marina at the local Quay.
- He is, after all, a navy veteran who whistles for his children, a widower withdrawn so deeply into mourning that he flees from the memories that possess his home.
- You can whistle for your inquiry into the murder of so-called ‘informants’.
Phrases
blow the whistle on
(as) clean as a whistle
whistle something down the wind
whistle in the dark
whistle in the wind
Origin
Old English (h)wistlian (verb), (h)wistle (noun), of Germanic origin; imitative and related to Swedish vissla 'to whistle'.
The first meaning of whistle was ‘a small pipe or flute’. Its origin seems to lie in imitation, for it mimics the physical process of whistling. Whisper (Old English) comes from the same root. In wet your whistle, or have a drink, the whistle is your mouth or throat. The first example of its use is by Geoffrey Chaucer in The Reeve's Tale. To blow the whistle on someone responsible for doing something wrong is to inform on them. The expression comes from a referee blowing a whistle to indicate that a player has broken the rules. When first used in the 1930s it meant ‘bring to an abrupt halt’, but by the 1970s it had come to refer specifically to people exposing wrongdoing in government or industry. In the 1930s a whistle-stop was a small American town on a railway. If a passenger wanted to get off the conductor would sound a whistle to tell the driver he had to stop. A whistle-stop tour was one made by a politician before an election that took in even these obscure places.