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chill

Pronunciation: /tʃɪl/

The English word “chill” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. A moderate, but uncomfortable and penetrating coldness.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. The hardened part of a casting, such as the tread of a carriage wheel.
  6. A lack of warmth and cordiality; unfriendliness.
  7. Calmness; equanimity.
  8. A sense of style; trendiness; savoir faire.
  9. A chilling effect; an atmosphere of this.

adjective

  1. Moderately cold or chilly.
  2. Unwelcoming; not cordial.
  3. Calm, relaxed, easygoing.
  4. "Cool"; meeting a certain hip standard or garnering the approval of a certain peer group.
  5. Okay, not a problem.

verb

  1. To lower the temperature of something; to cool.
  2. To become cold.
  3. To harden a metal surface by sudden cooling.
  4. To become hard by rapid cooling.
  5. To relax; to lie back; to take things easy.
  6. To "hang", hang out; to spend time with another person or group.

Etymology

From Middle English chele, chile, from Old English ċiele, ċele (“cold; coldness”), from Proto-West Germanic *kali, from Proto-Germanic *kaliz, from Proto-Indo-European *gel- (“to be cold”). Closely related with Dutch kil. Also akin to cool, cold, gel, and congeal, which see.

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.