How to Use lilt in a Sentence

lilt

1 of 2 noun
  • There was a charming lilt to her voice.
  • Suddenly, there’s a skip in its step and a lilt in the vocals.
    — Craig Jenkins, Vulture, 2 Apr. 2021
  • The recipe just waltzes along from there, a lazy lilt, the kitchen warming and savory aromas building.
    — Amiel Stanek, Bon Appetit, 9 Jan. 2018
  • That gives it a modern lilt and a fun reason to keep coming back to it as a daily driver.
    — Brittany Vincent, BGR, 4 Feb. 2022
  • The right length and lilt of a sentence will let your reader take your meaning from it, and take it with pleasure.
    — Carl Zimmer, Discover Magazine, 12 Jan. 2011
  • All that was missing was one of those Boston-style scally caps and a fake Irish lilt.
    — Ryan Ford, Detroit Free Press, 28 Aug. 2022
  • His steps transform from the intentional rhythm of a walk, albeit with a bit of a lilt, to the faster pace of a full-on run.
    — Breanna Draxler, National Geographic, 21 Aug. 2020
  • Amy asks her and somehow Wilson delivers that line with a lilt that keeps it from sounding corny.
    — Amy Nicholson, Los Angeles Times, 12 Mar. 2026
  • With lazy memories of warm-day picnics and warm-night quilts on the grass, family all around, the music lilts.
    — Los Angeles Times, 4 Oct. 2019
  • Irmhild is soft-spoken, a German lilt shading certain words, and tall, with a direct gaze.
    — Cassandra Landry, SFChronicle.com, 31 July 2019
  • Her rendition is slow and meandering, with lilts that lift the melody and then drop it again into quietness.
    — Alissa Wilkinson, Vox, 12 July 2018
  • This Mediterranean restaurant with a Lebanese lilt brims with surprises.
    — Tom Sietsema, Washington Post, 5 Oct. 2022
  • The lilt substitutes for a question, a can-I-help-you, which, in my opinion, would be too subservient.
    — Literary Hub, 3 Mar. 2026
  • The 33-year-old’s sharp register is stunning—a loopy lilt full of acrobatic twists and turns.
    — Will Dukes, Rolling Stone, 9 Dec. 2022
  • The score, too, shimmers with prettiness, lolling in lavender-and-plum harmonies, savoring the two-note lilt of a harp.
    — Vulture, 23 Nov. 2022
  • But sternness could also disappear in a flash, with a smile, a lilt of his head, a wave of the baton producing a sweet lyricism.
    — Los Angeles Times, 24 July 2019
  • Each time the motif returned, Williamson eloquently brought forth the lilt and nuances of an ancient culture.
    — Howard Reich, chicagotribune.com, 10 Oct. 2019
  • The word has a natural lilt, a melody that builds to a pitch and gently subsides like a wavelet breaking on a Mediterranean shore.
    — Paul Richardson, Condé Nast Traveler, 23 Jan. 2023
  • For example, Markle’s vowels might still sound American, but the lilt of the sentence might be less so.
    — Cari Romm, The Cut, 10 July 2018
  • But Compton’s voice—slightly raspy, with the lilt of a Caribbean accent—was focussed and calm.
    — Helen Rosner, The New Yorker, 28 Aug. 2020
  • The winds conveyed the colorful splendor of the Firebird with fast flutterings and trills shaped with a lovely lilt.
    — Tim Diovanni, Dallas News, 29 May 2021
  • With little room to maneuver, Capuano sketched out an idea for factory-style doorways with a Parisian lilt.
    — Keith Flanagan, Architectural Digest, 2 Sep. 2025
  • But the youthful lilt in her speech reminds the listener of her age and connects Attah with her target teen audience.
    — Amanda Klarsfeld, sun-sentinel.com, 17 Nov. 2020
  • There’s still a twangy undertone, though, in both the Music Row genesis of the songs and the lilt of the production.
    — Natalie Weiner, Billboard, 19 Aug. 2021
  • The four-speed still has a sweet shifting motion that's occasionally accurate, the clutch is light and the engine takes on a rippy lilt.
    — John Pearley Huffman, Car and Driver, 15 Aug. 2020
  • The idiomatic lilt Valcuha brought to the waltzing rhythms lived in the flexible phrasing of the orchestra.
    — John Von Rhein, chicagotribune.com, 2 June 2017
  • Whiting is from Richmond, Virginia, a soft, barely detectable Southern lilt comes across in her words.
    — Marc Bona, cleveland, 15 Mar. 2021
  • In the chorus, all of the instruments drop out and we’re left with just a piano playing a series of riffs over the heartbreaking lilt of Warwick’s voice.
    — Geoff Edgers, Washington Post, 10 Feb. 2023
  • The salt air smelled like Havana, the cobblestones laid by the same colonizers, but the Spanish had a different lilt.
    — Adriana Rozas Rivera, refinery29.com, 3 Aug. 2021
  • McIlroy, with his charming Irish lilt and very blue-collar backstory, was tailor-made for the gig but he’s been humbled by golf plenty, too.
    — Dana O’Neil, CNN Money, 13 May 2026

lilt

2 of 2 verb
  • At the song’s lilting refrain, the kids led the teams onto the field, the crowd growing still louder.
    — Cheri Lucas Rowlands, Longreads, 21 Apr. 2026
  • Jones speaks in a deep baritone, her Robeson County lilt adding bounce and verve to the words.
    — Isabel Spiegel, Smithsonian Magazine, 5 Oct. 2020
  • The strings lilt and wail until Zauner begins shredding, like the notes can’t come out of her fast enough.
    — Justin Curto, Vulture, 4 June 2021
  • The electronics lilt through the arrangements like a string of dim lights draped above a roaring fireplace.
    — Dean Van Nguyen, Pitchfork, 27 Feb. 2026
  • Their small sounds and snuffles were barely audible above the lilting bleeps of incubators in the neonatal ward.
    — Hajar Harb, Washington Post, 17 Nov. 2023
  • After a few more days, the ballroom would begin to feel a bit lighter as private classes started back up and a stream of melodies lilted in the background.
    — Corina Knoll Ben Laffin Mark Abramson, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2023
  • Sauvé is extremely soft-spoken, her slight Quebecois accent lilting over the crowd’s hush.
    — Cameron Cook, Pitchfork, 7 Nov. 2023
  • This region is vast and diverse, with as many variations on our signature lilt as there are preparations of barbecue.
    — Betsy Cribb Watson, Southern Living, 14 Jan. 2025
  • The group composes its own sacred music, lilting songs that prompt women in green-and-white wraparounds to vigorously shake their bodies.
    — Rodney Muhumuza, Los Angeles Times, 10 Apr. 2026
  • But in the main guesthouse Tuesday, lilting reggae wafted through the open air bar, as government relief workers tapped away on laptops.
    — Richard Fausset, New York Times, 3 Oct. 2017
  • On some days inside that glitzy office, the soundtrack to his view is Spotify, lilting Grateful Dead music.
    — Dana Benbow, Indianapolis Star, 4 Jan. 2018
  • Classical music lilts throughout imposing salons lined with portraits of well-coiffed luminaries, some of them former guests.
    — Kasia Dietz, Condé Nast Traveler, 10 Sep. 2021
  • As a Boston native, Stone’s accent is thicker than chowdah, bless her, with a laugh that lilts like a fly ball onto Lansdowne Street.
    — Sean Keeler, Denver Post, 25 Jan. 2026
  • Rides spun in time to lilting carnival music by the Los Angeles composer Daniel Wohl.
    — Lauren Herstik Chantal Anderson, New York Times, 18 Dec. 2023
  • Kitty’s voice is also much deeper and more powerful compared to Watson’s lilting, airy singing heard on the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack.
    — Ariana Brockington, refinery29.com, 5 Mar. 2020
  • There are poems set to lilting strains that turn into themes, and because the movie’s composer is mood master Gabriel Yared, the melodies linger nicely without feeling overplayed.
    — Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 22 June 2023
  • Friedman has matched that sensibility here with songs that slide from lilting, gaslight-era melodiousness into a jagged, more contemporary anxiety.
    — Ben Brantley, New York Times, 9 Mar. 2020
  • With her long blonde hair, lilting soprano and acoustic guitar, the enduring image of the singer-songwriter icon is one that dates back to the late ‘60s or early ‘70s.
    — Maeve McDermott, USA TODAY, 27 Oct. 2017
  • Argentines joking around in lilting Spanish and Australians with their distinctive garrulous accent.
    — Gustavo Arellano, Los Angeles Times, 4 July 2024
  • The musical prose hums with different accents, most evidently with Milena’s quips in French and Enzo’s Levantine lilt.
    — Literary Hub, 22 Jan. 2026
  • Carpenter is plainly a student of Parton’s, evoking her pinup styling (voluminous hair, big red lips), her persona (sharp with a knowing wink), and her voice, which is rich and husky and accompanied by a country lilt.
    — Amanda Petrusich, New Yorker, 2 Sep. 2025
  • Waltzing along the fine line between preciousness and profundity, Brion’s lilting piano theme perfectly echoes the tone of a beguiling romance that — by design — struggles to find a balance in its feelings.
    — Indiewire Staff, IndieWire, 14 Aug. 2024
  • The witty script glitters with the couple’s duelling voice-over accounts of the way things happened; the effervescent score, by André Previn, seems to set their voices to lilting music as if in a virtual operetta.
    — The New Yorker, 2 Apr. 2020
  • Bagpipes and lilting burrs form a pleasant music as young men and women fumble their way through courtship, every overture made thrilling and a little dangerous by the God-fearing propriety of the remote island society that surrounds them.
    — Zachary Barnes, WSJ, 12 Oct. 2023
  • And in the score, Joplin pushed himself past ragtime into music that lilts, soars and swings with tenderness and vivacity, somewhat in the grand operetta style of Gilbert and Sullivan (if without the patter).
    — Zachary Woolfe, New York Times, 27 July 2023
  • With her band members backing her up, Ballerini shows her voice to be well-suited for the song, never exactly imitating the rock icon’s inflections but instead adding a bit of her own East Tennessee lilt to the mix.
    — Jon Freeman, Rolling Stone, 2 July 2021
  • And so many of his ideas are inspired, like adding the forlorn country lilt of an accordionist (Veli Kujala) to the scene in which Hamlet corrals a traveling troupe of actors to put on an evocation of his father’s murder.
    — New York Times, 15 May 2022
  • With his insatiable interest in pop culture, lilting accent and personality that's equal parts innocence and ignorance, Hank offers energetic comic relief in an increasingly dark comedy.
    — Bill Keveney, USA TODAY, 26 Apr. 2018
  • The film gently lilts you into the lives of its characters and its suburban Ohio setting, revealing regular-people problems — divorce, moving, aging parents, money — with which Chris Pine and Jenny Slate’s characters deal.
    — Vanessa Franko, Los Angeles Times, 23 Jan. 2026
  • The score by Amine Bouhafa and Isabelle Laudenbach — the director’s sister, and also an accomplished flamenco guitarist — deftly interpolates scraps and strains of Bizet’s original compositions, stripped of operatic excess and given a folky lilt.
    — Guy Lodge, Variety, 31 May 2026

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'lilt.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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