chillwave
chillwave noun: a genre of music of the late 2000s, characterized by effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.
Noun
chillwave (uncountable)
- A genre of music of the late 2000s, characterized by effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.
- As music created and shaped by the lens of blogs, music forums, and other forms of online comment, chillwave was subject to a backlash almost as soon as it had been labeled and defined.2016, Sheila Whiteley, Shara Rambarran, editors, The Oxford Handbook of Music and Virtuality, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 418
Origin of chillwave
From chill + -wave. Coined tongue-in-cheek on the blog Hipster Runoff in 2009.
Questions about chillwave
- What does chillwave mean?
- Chillwave means a genre of music of the late 2000s, characterized by effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines.
- What part of speech is chillwave?
- Chillwave is a noun.
Words near chillwave in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: chillwave (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “chillwave.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/chillwave. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.