Chill

How to spell chill

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce chill

What does chill mean?

1. nounA feeling or quality of cold, often slight or unpleasant.
2. verbTo make or become cold, especially by refrigerating food or drink.
3. adjectiveInformal term for calm, easygoing, and not easily upset.
4. verbInformal verb meaning to relax and stop worrying.

Chill in a sentence

• noun

  A sudden chill ran through the empty office as the heating failed.

• verb

  You should chill the white wine for at least an hour before serving.

• adjective

  Her new manager is pretty chill about flexible working hours.

• verb

  After the deadline passed, they decided to just chill for the weekend.

• noun

  There was a real chill in the morning air by late autumn.

• verb

  The recipe says to chill the dough overnight in the fridge.

Where does chill come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Chill traces back to the Old English noun ciele (also spelled cele), which meant 'cold, coolness, or frost'. That word grew from the same Proto-Germanic source, *kaliz, that also gave English 'cold' and 'cool', so the three are close cousins that all describe a drop in temperature. For centuries chill stayed mainly a noun for the sensation of cold or a feverish shiver, and only later did it become a verb for making something cold and an adjective for an unpleasant coldness. The relaxed, informal senses ('to chill out', 'a chill attitude') are a twentieth-century American development, the idea being that staying cool and calm keeps you unbothered. The spelling is reassuringly phonetic: the 'ch' digraph plus a doubled 'l', which is the usual English pattern after a short stressed vowel, as in 'hill' and 'still'.

How the word is built

• chill (from Old English ciele 'cold, frost'); single root, no affixes