Word.ws English Dictionary

whistle in the wind

whistle in the wind verb: to attempt something that is futile; to say something that is not heeded.

Verb

whistle in the wind (third-person singular simple present whistles in the wind, present participle whistling in the wind, simple past and past participle whistled in the wind)

  1. (UK, especially, idiomatic) To attempt something that is futile; to say something that is not heeded.
    • [T]hey are expending more and more effort on trying to get right something that cannot, and should not, be done in the first place. […] Endless exhortations to "do it better" are, to put it politely, whistling in the wind.2009 February 22, Simon Caulkin, “However good the pay, it doesn't buy results”, in Guardian, UK, retrieved 29 Jul 2018
    • It doesn’t matter how strong your USP is or how powerful your value proposition, if the message isn’t reaching the right people you're whistling in the wind.2014 January 21, “Don't whistle in the wind?”, in DLH Marketing, UK, retrieved 29 Jul 2018

Synonyms of whistle in the wind

Forms of whistle in the wind

third-person singular presentwhistles in the wind
present participlewhistling in the wind
past participlewhistled in the wind
pastwhistled in the wind

Questions about whistle in the wind

What does whistle in the wind mean?
Whistle in the wind means to attempt something that is futile; to say something that is not heeded.
What part of speech is whistle in the wind?
Whistle in the wind is a verb.
What is the past tense of whistle in the wind?
The past tense of whistle in the wind is whistled in the wind.

Words near whistle in the wind in the dictionary

  1. whistle Dixie
  2. whistle down the wind
  3. whistle for
  4. whistle graph
  5. whistle in the dark
  6. whistle in the wind
  7. whistle jigs to a milestone
  8. whistle note
  9. whistle notes
  10. whistle past
  11. whistle past the graveyard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistle in the wind (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.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: En-au-whistle in the wind.ogg.

Cite this entry: “whistle in the wind.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whistle_in_the_wind. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.