chill
adjective · verb · noun
Simple meaning
"Cool"; meeting a certain hip standard or garnering the approval of a certain peer group.
Pronunciation
Say it like this:
chilIPA pronunciation (US)
ˈtʃɪl
This word is pronounced essentially the same in American and British English, so one transcription covers both.
IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet) is a standard way of writing speech sounds.
Definition
Everyday modern meanings first, grouped by part of speech.
adjective
slang
"Cool"; meeting a certain hip standard or garnering the approval of a certain peer group.
slang
Calm, relaxed, easygoing.
slang
Okay, not a problem.
Unwelcoming; not cordial.
Moderately cold or chilly.
verb
transitive
To lower the temperature of something; to cool.
intransitive
To become cold.
Depress or discourage
“The news of the city's surrender chilled the soldiers.”
intransitiveslang
To relax; to lie back; to take things easy.
intransitiveslang
To "hang", hang out; to spend time with another person or group.
intransitiveslang
To smoke marijuana.
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.
A moderate, but uncomfortable and penetrating coldness.
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.
An iron mould or portion of a mould, serving to cool rapidly, and so to harden, the surface of molten iron brought in contact with it.
The hardened part of a casting, such as the tread of a carriage wheel.
Calmness; equanimity.
Word at a Glance
- Difficulty
- B2 · Upper Intermediate
- Frequency
- Moderately Common
- Typical Use
- Neutral / general English
Word Aura™
How this word commonly comes across.
Aura for this meaning
This meaning: "Cool"; meeting a certain hip standard or garnering the approval of a certain peer group.
Used this way, chill is a reasonably familiar word that usually carries little praise or criticism of its own. It turns up most in everyday conversation and social media or informal writing contexts.
- Emotional tone
- Neutral
- Formality
- Very casual
- Intensity
- Not strongly marked
- How common
- Moderately common
- Connotation
- Playful
- Usage feel
- Playful and informal
Where it naturally appears
- Everyday conversation
- Social media/informal writing
Usage note
Slang: natural in speech and messages between friends, but out of place in school, work or published writing.
Word Aura describes common impressions, not a measurement. Tone changes with sentence, speaker, relationship and situation.
More ways to use chill
- “The news of the city's surrender chilled the soldiers.”verb
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Common Patterns and Combinations
How this word naturally appears with others.
Word Family
Related forms, grouped by how they connect.
Inflected forms
Grammatical variations of the same word.
The process of becoming cooler.
Excitation that makes your hair stand up or that chills your bones.
Word family
Words built from the same root.
Very hot and finely tapering pepper of special pungency.
Compound terms
Established multiword terms.
Successive stages of chills and fever that is a symptom of malaria.
Become quiet or calm, especially after a state of agitation.
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Dictionary data from Wiktionary via the Free Dictionary API. Simple meanings, combinations and word intelligence are built from verified reference data, no AI is used to load this page.