What's the difference between shriek and whine?

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.

Whine


Definition:

  • (v. i.) To utter a plaintive cry, as some animals; to moan with a childish noise; to complain, or to tell of sorrow, distress, or the like, in a plaintive, nasal tone; hence, to complain or to beg in a mean, unmanly way; to moan basely.
  • (v. t.) To utter or express plaintively, or in a mean, unmanly way; as, to whine out an excuse.
  • (n.) A plaintive tone; the nasal, childish tone of mean complaint; mean or affected complaint.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) It’s great that the new Star Wars film is more diverse , with John Boyega and Daisy Ridley in significant roles; I am pleased to see everyone on #BoycottStarWarsVII gnash and whine uselessly.
  • (2) You can whine about the politics of this until you are green, white and orange in the face but if you want to learn Irish – and many people do – your best bet is to organise your own classes.
  • (3) Green Day love it The American rock band Green Day are proud champions of Salinger's antihero; their 1994 song Basket Case is a nasally homage in nasally whines.
  • (4) I whine that I haven’t been able to successfully place an order, let alone indicate how i’d like my steak done.
  • (5) So that rightwing free market ideologues can open up all those markets that the US have been whining to the World Trade Organisation about for decades; for some ideological principal that says people should pay less tax and privately fund only the services they need and want, and screw the collective community if they cannot afford to pay their insurance; that puts money in the pockets of the very richest in society, while the very poorest will be expected to step up or die out; that any public provision will not be on the basis of the most needy, but on the basis of who those in control consider to be the most deserving.
  • (6) On 16 November I find another writerly whine: "I feel sucked hollow."
  • (7) "Can you explain to the Whining Yanks that they didn't have a goal disallowed in the match against Slovenia, since the referee clearly blew for what he perceived to be a foul before the ball had reached Edu and ended up in the back of the net," lectures Matt.
  • (8) Whining about cab drivers transcends national boundaries.
  • (9) When you carry on moping, and whining like Charlie Brown after listening to the whole Smiths catalog at every single club you've played, it's hard to believe Tristelme was ever destined for true greatness.
  • (10) He would be watching the dogfights, planes diving and looping, their engines whining, each hurling fire at the other.
  • (11) Effects of diazepam were examined on the whine reaction elicited by LH stimulation and on unit activities in the LH and Abm in cats.
  • (12) The whole show is really just a riff on that well-meaning girl in 1980s Grange Hill whining, "Why do you eat so many sandwiches, Ro-land?"
  • (13) We know we'll get into trouble for it and we're certainly not whining about that."
  • (14) And in the absence of a firm rebuttal, all you can do, as Kerry did and Romney is now doing, is whine.
  • (15) This Fourth of July weekend, we Americans did what we're known for: we grilled meats, whined about air travel, and looked back in fondness at our Founding Fathers who refused to pay their taxes.
  • (16) Their president-elect whining about someone being mean about his restaurant, or gloating over The Apprentice’s ratings dip under Arnold Schwarzenegger.
  • (17) As for its leadership, the current choice of new brooms includes a prince from a non-democracy, a South Korean billionaire and Fifa insider who nodded Blatterism through for the best part of two decades before deciding opportunely to speak out (and is now whining about being taken out by the “hitman” that is Blatter’s ethics committee), and Michel Platini , whose reputation appears to have a half-life shorter than most highly radioactive isotopes.
  • (18) As the new Zimbabwe effectively became a one-party state under the gifted but autocratic Mugabe, as terrible droughts undermined the economy and confidence of what was so recently one of the richest and most fertile African countries and as Aids cut a swathe through the population, the old pariah, defiant and bigoted to the last, could not resist saying, with the familiar Smithy whine: "I told you so."
  • (19) She was wolf-reared in Judd Apatow's tumescent-adolescent boy-zone (none of whose denizens is ever cast for his hair colour), but she can take any of those boys to the woodshed for a rhetorical spanking, rich in obscenity and scatology, in that razor-sharp whine.
  • (20) Offensive behaviour, i.e., whine response to a rod presented in front of the snout and blowing air on back hair was markedly observed, and whine, attacking and biting responses to tapping with a rod on the back in these cats were marked.