Word.ws English Dictionary

whistles in the wind

whistles in the wind is the third-person singular simple present indicative of whistle in the wind.

Meaning of whistle in the wind

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

Questions about whistles in the wind

What is whistles in the wind the third-person singular simple present indicative of?
Whistles in the wind is the third-person singular simple present indicative of whistle in the wind.

Words near whistles in the wind in the dictionary

  1. whistles
  2. whistles Dixie
  3. whistles down the wind
  4. whistles for
  5. whistles in the dark
  6. whistles in the wind
  7. whistles past
  8. whistles past the graveyard
  9. whistles up
  10. whistlestop
  11. whistlestop tour

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistles in the wind (page history and authors); 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.

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