strident
/ˈstrʌɪd(ə)nt
/adjective
1(Of a sound) loud and harsh; grating: his voice had become increasingly strident...
- I tried to sleep on the hour-long ride, but the harsh, strident sound became louder and the long menacing finger pointed angrily.
- The only real flaw comes from the age and technical limitations of the time, which results in a somewhat harsh and strident sound on occasion.
- Its raw strident sound was one of the first to make use of the rhythms of jazz.
Synonyms
harsh, raucous, rough, grating, rasping, jarring, loud, stentorian, shrill, screeching, piercing, ear-piercing;
unmelodious, unmusical, discordant, dissonant, unharmonious
rare stridulous, stridulant, stridulatory, stentorious
1.1 Phonetics another term for sibilant.Strident vowels are fairly common in Khoisan languages, where they contrast with simple pharyngealized vowels....
- The greatest degree of pharyngealisation is found in the strident vowels of the Khoisan languages.
2Presenting a point of view, especially a controversial one, in an excessively forceful way: public pronouncements on the crisis became less strident...
- He likes to hold the floor and has strident views on just about everything.
- Such strident views worry me, but I leave the politics of England to those here.
- The duo have a lot in common and a fresh face fronting the most successful airline in Europe would present a less strident visage to the EU and the general public.
Derivatives
stridency
/ noun ...- Yet I must confess to feeling a little jaded with the constant stridency and intellectual conceit of many of the contributions published, however much I agreed with the sentiment.
- Given its stridency of tone, it would be disingenuous to claim that it merely represented a divergent view; it is anything but dispassionately presented.
- Their stridency resulted in the general ‘outing’ of the worst kind of communal prejudices from even the respectable middle class.
Origin
Mid 17th century: from Latin strident- 'creaking', from the verb stridere.
This is from Latin stridere ‘to creak’.