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chilling

adjectiveverbnounattested in dialogue

  • //ˈt͡ʃɪlɪŋ//

Becoming cold.

adjective

  1. 1

    Becoming cold.

    As they reached the street the ‘Duchess’ caught a swirling hem of lace about her chilling ankles.

  2. 2

    Causing cold.

  3. 3

    Causing mild fear.

    It was a chilling story, but the children enjoyed it.

    22 March 2012, Scott Tobias, AV Club The Hunger Gameshttp://www.avclub.com/articles/the-hunger-games,71293/ Displaying a sturdy professionalism throughout that stops just short of artistry, director Gary Ross, who co-scripted with Collins and Billy Ray, does his strongest work in the early scenes, which set up the stakes with chilling efficiency.

Etymology

From Middle English chilling, chelling, chyllinge, chillynge, chillande, equivalent to chill + -ing.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of chillpresent participle and gerund of chill

noun

  1. 1

    The act by which something is chilled.

    To such perceivings we give names like these: seeings, hearings, smellings, chillings and burnings, pleasures and pains, desires […]

Etymology

From Middle English chilling, chillyng, chyllynge, equivalent to chill + -ing.

Forms

plural
chillings
comparative
more chilling
superlative
most chilling
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).