Thrill

How to spell thrill

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce thrill

What does thrill mean?

1. nounA sudden feeling of intense excitement, pleasure, or fear.
2. verbTo cause someone to feel a sudden wave of excitement or pleasure.

Thrill in a sentence

• noun

  The first parachute jump gave her a real thrill.

• verb

  The surprise promotion will thrill the whole sales team.

• noun

  There is a certain thrill in finding a bargain you have been hunting for.

• verb

  Fireworks never fail to thrill the children at the festival.

Where does thrill come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English verb 'thyrlian', which meant to pierce, bore, or make a hole through something. That verb was built on 'thyrel', a hole, which in turn came from 'thurh', the ancestor of the modern word 'through'. In Middle English it appeared as 'thrillen', a metathesised form of the earlier 'thirlen', still carrying the literal idea of piercing. By the late 1500s the sense had shifted in a vivid way: a sudden emotion was imagined as something that 'pierces' the body, producing a tingling rush, and so 'thrill' came to mean a wave of excitement or a sharp sensation passing through a person. The surprising link to 'through' and to the now obsolete 'nostril' (literally 'nose hole') explains the double 'l' that learners sometimes forget.

How the word is built

• thrill (from Old English thyrlian: to pierce or bore through)