as in shrill
marked by or producing a harsh combination of sounds
a dissonant chorus of noises arose from the busy construction site
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Recent Examples of dissonant
As someone who built her career by upending traditional dynamics and giving women more control over their interactions online, having no say in how her own story is told feels dissonant.
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Eva Roytburg, Fortune, 20 Sep. 2025
Better-than-forecast retail sales for August out Tuesday contributed a sturdy reading to a dissonant set of macroeconomic signals.
—Michael Santoli, CNBC, 16 Sep. 2025
His new film, Highest 2 Lowest, which opened Friday, flips Akira Kurosawa’s mannered 1963 staple, High and Low, into a rowdy, topical, laugh-out-loud romp (starring Denzel Washington, Jeffrey Wright, and A$AP Rocky) that’s as beautifully jarring as a dissonant sax solo.
—Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 17 Aug. 2025
Still, the moody, dissonant synths were transfixing.
—Hazlitt, 30 July 2025
See All Example Sentences for dissonant
Recent Examples of Synonyms for dissonant
Adjective
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What's more, this door alarm features three sensitivity levels and emits a loud, shrill sound that will instantly scare an intruder away.—
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When Nosferatu showed his corpselike face, the Wonder Morton’s Vox Humana (human voice) and concert-flute pipes buzzed together in a shrill cluster.—
Adjective
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Simons also emphasized that December jobs data are among the noisiest of the year and should not be over-interpreted.—
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And then there is the noisy parade of vehicles passing nearby on their way to who knows what?—
Adjective
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This time, the commission’s bargaining position was undercut from the start by a cacophonous chorus, with key member states preemptively voicing their opposition to retaliation.—
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By making the dialogue more cacophonous as the pressure mounts, Ottosson replicates the feelings of the characters, who have trained hundreds of times for various scenarios — but are now experiencing something that goes beyond their typical exercises.—
Adjective
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Using a speaker outside the stall results in reverb and echoing as the music bounces around the bathroom walls, making the sound muddy and unpleasant.—
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Given the lack of gravity, even a runny nose can turn into an extremely unpleasant experience, forcing astronauts to resort to unusual measures just to drain mucus from their nasal passages.—
Adjective
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Baumbach’s remarkably faithful take on Don DeLillo’s absurdist 1985 novel is a half-thrilling, half-discordant attempt to harmonize two distinct voices.—
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Why is the official narrative of the history of the Catholic Church so discordant with the archival sources of the Middle Ages?—
Adjective
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The actress donned a slinky metallic shift dress in her latest Instagram post in partnership with the skincare brand Shiseido.—
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Red flags included bitterness or any metallic notes the beans may have picked up during processing.—
Adjective
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Those songs remind Omara of real people and real events, political interludes whose senselessness and brutality have left unmusical lacunae in her life.—
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His parents were unmusical Russian-Jewish immigrants who ran various businesses with mixed success.—
Adjective
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Setting Discordant Personal Goals A 2023 study published in Current Psychology finds that partners’ inharmonious goals can have detrimental effects on relationships.—
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For sixteen hours a week, Valentine hopes to share some melody in a place that, for some, can feel inharmonious.—
Cite this Entry
“Dissonant.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/dissonant. Accessed 13 Jan. 2026.
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