Chillwave
noun
noun ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
Noun
- 1 A genre of music of the late 2000s, characterized by effects processing, synthesizers, looping, sampling, and heavily filtered vocals with simple melodic lines. uncountable
"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."
Example
More examples"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."
Etymology
From chill + -wave. Coined tongue-in-cheek on the blog Hipster Runoff in 2009.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.