roil

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See also: roił

English

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WOTD – 1 August 2010

Etymology

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Origin uncertain. Possibly from French or Middle French rouiller (“to rust, make muddy”), from Old French rouil (“mud, rust”), from Vulgar Latin *robicula, from Latin robigo (“rust, blight”)

Pronunciation

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Verb

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roil (third-person singular simple present roils, present participle roiling, simple past and past participle roiled)

  1. (transitive, of a fluid, especially a liquid) To render turbid by stirring up the dregs or sediment of.
    Synonyms: agitate, stir, stir up
    to roil wine, cider, etc, in casks or bottles
    to roil a spring
    dust storms roiling the skies
    • 2015, David Hare, chapter 1, in The Blue Touch Paper:
      [of St Leonards in East Sussex in 1947] A sort of roiling mist seemed year-round to hold the town in its grip.
  2. (transitive, of a person or group of people) To annoy; to make angry; to throw into discord.
    Synonyms: irritate, rile, rile up, stir up
    • 1890, Roger North, Lives of the Norths:
      That his friends should believe it, was what roiled him exceedingly.
    • 2021 December 13, Molly Ball, Jeffrey Kluger, Alejandro de la Garza, “Elon Musk: Person of the Year 2021”, in Time‎[1]:
      […] and amid Musk’s sale of 10% of his Tesla stock, a process that roiled markets, cost him billions and should produce enough tax revenue to fund the Commerce Department for a year.
  3. (intransitive) To bubble, seethe.
    • 1991, Stephen King, Needful Things:
      By noon, Brian's stomach had begun to roil and knot. He hurried down to the bathroom at the end of the hall in his stocking feet, closed the door, and vomited into the toilet bowl as quietly as he could.
    • 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 2, in Internal Combustion‎[2]:
      Throughout the 1500s, the populace roiled over a constellation of grievances of which the forest emerged as a key focal point. The popular late Middle Ages fictional character Robin Hood, dressed in green to symbolize the forest, dodged fines for forest offenses and stole from the rich to give to the poor. But his appeal was painfully real and embodied the struggle over wood.
    • 2020 June 3, Wesley Morris, “The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.”, in New York Times‎[3]:
      These videos are the stone truth. Quaking proof of insult, seasick funerals. Livestreamed or uploaded, or suppressed then suspiciously unearthed as found footage. Last week, the archive grew by two, and now the nation’s roiling.
  4. (obsolete, intransitive) To wander; to roam.
  5. (dialect, intransitive) To romp.
    • 1991, Climbing - Issues 127-129, page 34:
      The finale was a romp in which the entire troupe burst out of the bouldering cave and roiled along the walls.
    • 2017, Sondra Fraleigh, Tamah Nakamura, Hijikata Tatsumi and Ohno Kazuo:
      As artists they were exploratory; in Rose Colored Dance they performed in playful embrace, smelled each other's feet, and roiled in mischief, rolling on top of each other.
    • 2019, Vita Murrow, High-Five to the Hero, page 78:
      When the children returned from school, Pip sat among them as they did their homework. He peeled children off the floor when they roiled in frustration and plucked cats from the furniture.
    • 2020, Richard Blanco, Caridad Moro, Nikki Moustaki, Grabbed, page 58:
      A school let out, teens in their miraculously white, pressed shirts and blue pants and skirts, surely having come that morning from crowded, dirt-floored huts without water. They roiled over the sidewalk and flowed around me, a sweaty, old-lady tourist in her long-sleeved, 50 SPF shirt, pants, and pastel hat – a lump in their path.

Derived terms

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Translations

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Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for “roil”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.)

Anagrams

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Estonian

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Noun

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roil

  1. adessive plural of roog
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