to cause (as a liquid) to move about in a circle especially repeatedly
kept swirling her lemonade until the ice had melted and it was completely watered down
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Recent Examples of swirls
Verb
Max Martin, Grande sings of blowing through breakups and make-ups and enduring mounting exhaustion with mass notoriety while the music swirls patiently and frequently angrily underneath.—
Craig Jenkins,
Vulture,
3 Aug. 2026 The galaxy's heart shines brightly in the image, with gleaming rays of light radiating from its center while gas and dust swirls around.—
Chelsea Gohd,
Space.com,
19 May 2026 Longoria’s approach to the wild fervour that continually swirls around the Velodrome was to try to harness it by hiring comparably combustible coaches like Jorge Sampaoli, Igor Tudor, Gennaro Gattuso and De Zerbi.—
Tom Williams,
New York Times,
17 May 2026 To load the product onto the brush, Barnes swirls the tool into the pan twice and taps it twice to prevent fallout.—
Jenny Berg,
Vogue,
12 Dec. 2025 The lights are dim and jazzy music swirls the intimate crowd.—
Sofia Celeste,
Footwear News,
10 Oct. 2025 Energy has had a tremendous five-year run, but investors have been cautious in 2025 as uncertainty swirls around policymakers.—
Jeff Kilburg,
CNBC,
3 Oct. 2025
Noun
Such a beautiful sculpture, mimicking the swirls found in nature (the cosmos, shells, Fibonacci-following topiary) felt a far cry from the swirl of emotions prompted by my favorite TV shows.—
Lara Johnson-Wheeler,
Vogue,
3 July 2026
Refusing to do so, Luis stirs a rivalry and potentially endangers his own employment.
—
Dennis Harvey,
Variety,
31 July 2026
While dealing with an impending counterattack from Oda, Murashige finds that trouble stirs in his own courts as mysterious deaths, from a child prisoner to other officials, end up mysteriously murdered.
Tzikas pointed to the San Juan Rapids, Clay Banks and Sailor Bar areas as those with stronger currents and eddies that can throw individuals from their rafts and paddleboards or submerge them before shooting them rapidly downstream.
—
Reeti Malhotra
July 10,
Sacbee.com,
10 July 2026
Convection involves turbulent eddies of warm air rising from the ground into the atmosphere above, and latent heat involves the absorption or release of energy from a phase change without the temperature changing.
The best viewing is generally after midnight, when Earth rotates into debris left by Comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle.
—
Jamie Carter,
Forbes.com,
10 Aug. 2026
Sacramento’s luxury suite at Golden 1 Center, obtained as part of $225 million in public financing for the arena, rotates among nonprofits through a city program.
These events occur when extremely hot underground water suddenly turns into steam, expands, and blasts apart the surrounding rock.
—
Atharva Gosavi,
Interesting Engineering,
12 Aug. 2026
Find out what the bill does when one workflow triples its tool calls after a model upgrade, because that is the scenario that turns a modest platform fee into a line item the CFO wants explained.