Word.ws English Dictionary

whistling in the wind

whistling in the wind is the present participle and gerund 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 whistling in the wind

What is whistling in the wind the present participle and gerund of?
Whistling in the wind is the present participle and gerund of whistle in the wind.

Words near whistling in the wind in the dictionary

  1. whistling face syndrome
  2. whistling for
  3. whistling hare
  4. whistling hares
  5. whistling in the dark
  6. whistling in the wind
  7. whistling kite
  8. whistling marmot
  9. whistling marmots
  10. whistling past
  11. whistling past the graveyard

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: whistling 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: “whistling in the wind.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/whistling_in_the_wind. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.