chill

Meanings

1. 1
   verb

   to depress or discourage

   The news of the city's surrender chilled the soldiers.

2. 2
   noun

   A moderate, but uncomfortable and penetrating coldness.

   There was a chill in the air.

3. 3
   noun

   A sudden penetrating sense of cold, especially one that causes a brief trembling nerve response through the body; the trembling response itself; often associated with illness: fevers and chills, or susceptibility to illness.

   Close the window or you'll catch a chill.

4. 4
   noun

   An uncomfortable and numbing sense of fear, dread, anxiety, or alarm, often one that is sudden and usually accompanied by a trembling nerve response resembling the body's response to biting cold.

   Despite the heat, he felt a chill as he entered the crime scene.

5. 5
   noun

   A lack of warmth and cordiality; unfriendliness.

   However, the chill between the two giants did not last long; every constituency except the Westernizers found virtue in warming up to China.

6. 6
   noun

   Calmness; equanimity.

   For those of us who relate to that furious paddling in some form (whether we choose to conceal it below the surface or not), we are probably also aware of what, besides the water, we are really clashing against: a culture of chill.

7. 7
   noun

   A sense of style; trendiness; savoir faire.

   Will and Grace still have no chill; having a pillow fight in the Oval Office proves that.

8. 8
   noun

   A chilling effect; an atmosphere of this.

   It was a courageous move by these activists, still living in the chill of the Cold War, to face red-baiting for holding protests that turned Washington's charges against the Cuban Revolution back on the U.S. government.

Etymology

From Middle English chele, chile, from Old English ċiele, ċele (“cold; coldness”), from Proto-West Germanic *kali, from Proto-Germanic *kaliz, from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to be cold”). Closely related with Dutch kil. Also akin to cool, cold, gel, and congeal, which see.