What's the difference between scream and shriek?

Scream


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To cry out with a shrill voice; to utter a sudden, sharp outcry, or shrill, loud cry, as in fright or extreme pain; to shriek; to screech.
  • (n.) A sharp, shrill cry, uttered suddenly, as in terror or in pain; a shriek; a screech.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) "I was eight in 1983, but I remember a plane that flew low over our Bulawayo suburb and army loud-hailers screaming: 'You are surrounded.'
  • (2) Seconds later the camera turns away as what sounds like at least 15 gunshots are fired amid bystanders’ screams.
  • (3) You could understand why the Met was frantic to find who had stabbed Rachel Nickell 49 times on Wimbledon Common while her screaming child looked on, but the case against Stagg was preposterous.
  • (4) Scream Queens is the kind of show where you discover a secret locked room in the basement in one scene and then we find out exactly what is in the room three scenes later.
  • (5) I remember the blood pouring across the floor and the screaming of the nanny looking after our boys."
  • (6) Barry Roux, Burger added: "I heard petrified screaming before the gunshots and just after the gunshots.
  • (7) Speaking through an interpreter, she said: We woke up from the screams.
  • (8) A 25-year-old man has handed himself in to police after video footage emerged that appeared to show a man screaming Islamophobic abuse at a pensioner, and then seeming to throw his walking frame out on to the pavement.
  • (9) When Dirk Nowitzki and the Dallas Mavericks beat the Heat in the 2011 NBA Finals , a series where James made a habit of disappearing in the fourth quarter, it somehow felt like an underdog victory (because nothing screams "true underdogs" like a Dallas-based team bankrolled by a billionaire mogul ).
  • (10) As fighter jets screamed overhead and tanks churned up the sand, it looked and sounded like the violent protests sweeping the Middle East had spread to the wealthy emirate of Abu Dhabi.
  • (11) In between, I watch a parade of Berliner life: women chain-smoking in the pool’s trademark wicker chairs, fully clothed men sipping a morning beer in the 26C heat, kids jumping off the diving pier and screaming down the large waterslide.
  • (12) His story - which he was led through on Monday by his lawyer - is that he was outside his house cleaning Sadie, his dog, when the girls came down the road; that he took Holly and Jessica into his house because Holly had a nosebleed; took them upstairs into the bathroom where Holly sat on the edge of the full bath and he gave her tissues to staunch it; took Holly into his bedroom, to sit on the bed while Jessica used the toilet, took Holly back into the bathroom where she could finish cleaning up her nosebleed; accidentally slipped beside Holly and the full bath, and heard a splash; froze in panic; placed his hand over Jessica's mouth because she was screaming, 'You pushed her'.
  • (13) An American citizen abandoned in a Yemeni jail amid the country’s spiralling chaos is heard screaming for his life in a newly released telephone call.
  • (14) You know – big rooms, lots of screaming people at the stage door.
  • (15) The officer orders Castile not to reach for it and not to pull it out to which Castile replies: “I’m not pulling it out.” The officer reaches his left arm into the vehicle, screaming, while he draws his weapon with his right hand and, all in one motion, fires seven bullets into the vehicle, killing Castile.
  • (16) Nobody is sure what dangerous chemical imbalance this would create but the Fiver is convinced we'd all be dust come October or November, the earth scorched, with only three survivors roaming o'er the barren landscape: Govan's answer to King Lear, ranting into a hole in the ground; a mute, wild-eyed pundit, staring without blinking into a hole in the ground; and a tall, irritable figure standing in front of the pair of them, screaming in the style popularised by Klaus Kinski, demanding they take a look at his goddamn trouser arrangement, which he has balanced here on the platform of his hand for easy perusal, or to hell with them, for they are no better than pigs, worthless, spineless pigs.
  • (17) When we were treating him, he was not screaming or crying, just in shock.” There was so much there in his face, the blood and the dust mixed, at that age Mustafa al-Sarout Hours after he and his family were rescued, Omran was discharged from hospital, having suffered a head injury and bruises in the attack, but nothing too serious.
  • (18) We’re going to have our country back, and protect our second amendment.” After each demagogic slogan, the crowd screamed its approval, waving placards that called themselves the “silent majority for Trump”.
  • (19) Although he grew up in the American south, you’d think he had spent years screaming from the stands of Old Trafford.
  • (20) Imran Khan, the cricketer turned politician, hosted the event, where Ridley, who also now does human rights work, said: "I call her the 'grey lady' because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continue to haunt those who heard her."

Shriek


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To utter a loud, sharp, shrill sound or cry, as do some birds and beasts; to scream, as in a sudden fright, in horror or anguish.
  • (v. t.) To utter sharply and shrilly; to utter in or with a shriek or shrieks.
  • (n.) A sharp, shrill outcry or scream; a shrill wild cry such as is caused by sudden or extreme terror, pain, or the like.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But the bedeviled foray also works as a potent allegory on the slow, vice-like workings of conscience, as guilt hunts down the protagonists with the shrieking remorselessness of Greek furies.
  • (2) At the place where adorable meets obnoxious and the purr becomes a shriek, Leslie Mann is waiting to unload a howitzer of funny in your face.
  • (3) There is no doubt she is still traumatised, and her voice rises to a shriek as she describes it.
  • (4) Dozens of cleaners gathered outside the ministry as the officials drove up, shrieking in high-pitched voices that could be heard several city blocks away, to protest forced public-sector sackings the inspectors are demanding.
  • (5) The works of this period include Revelation and Fall (1966), in which a nun in blood-red costume and a megaphone shrieks expressionist poems of Georg Trakl, the Missa super l’Homme Armé (1968), a parody of a Latin Mass, and above all Eight Songs for a Mad King (1969).
  • (6) I gaze, bemused and, yes, fascinated, at curious anthropological artefacts such as Bride Wars or He's Just Not That Into You or Confessions of a Shopaholic, in which Kate Hudson or Ginnifer Goodwin or Isla Fisher play characters who might almost belong to a third gender, a bubble-headed one that emits ear-splitting shrieks, teeters constantly on the verge of hysteria and acts as an indiscriminate mouthpiece for the placement of overpriced tat.
  • (7) One group of women shrieked “Hillary!” as she bent down to greet them.
  • (8) Leaving a Murdoch-dominated media landscape with shows where, each week, shrieking irradiated cannibals sing power ballads as they compete for the right to die?
  • (9) What everyone can hear, loud as a burglar alarm, is the shriek of self-interest dressed up as national interest.
  • (10) Coyle is a parliamentary newbie elected only in May, so we might cordially warn him and all those Labour and Conservative MPs who have shrieked about “bullying” that they spent this week in presentational danger of reducing a bombing campaign to what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin – “a plot device that motivates the characters and advances the story”, but which is often unimportant in itself.
  • (11) They believe they have a good idea about who the core readership is, and one of the ways they prise a reaction from that readership is through shrieked alerts and cautionary tales about The Other.
  • (12) Instead listeners heard a piercing shriek as Pargetter slid off the roof of his stately home, after defying his wife's orders and yielding to the suggestion of his brother-in-law, David, that it would be a good time to take down the banner, in icy darkness in the middle of a family party.
  • (13) Fellows of the Royal Society aren't supposed to shriek.
  • (14) Hope, change ... and TV in a hundred years Photograph: AMC Todd: You remember last year when pale, hollow-eyed individuals wandered out onto the streets of our great nation, grabbing anyone they could see by the lapels and shrieking, "HAVE YOU HEARD ABOUT THIS SHOW BREAKING BAD?
  • (15) Vote Green and you’ll get Tories!” they shriek at me.
  • (16) Had this announcement been made about the Queen, headlines would have shrieked, “Abdication!” Aides have stressed that she will carry on.
  • (17) I used to worry that computers were to blame: that modern connectivity was steadily turning all of us into a bunch of fake, shrieking character actors.
  • (18) The risks are in being ignored entirely or forcing an interjection and appearing “shrill” – the death shriek for women trying to get ahead anywhere.
  • (19) Particularly arresting were the new uses Bush was making of her voice: tracks such as Pull Out the Pin and Suspended in Gaffa teemed with a panoply of exaggerated accents and jarring phrasings, as Bush applied thespian emphasis on particular words or syllables, and developed a whole new vocabulary of harsh shrieks and throat-scorched yelps.
  • (20) Every open space, including in the CBD, sees rockets and flares shriek through the dark without warning and silhouettes run from recently lit fizzing cylinders.