Meaning

noun a high-pitched noise resembling a human cry

noun sharp piercing cry

verb make a high-pitched, screeching noise

origin1602; altered with expressive vowel lengthening from earlier skrech (1577), variant of obsolete scritch, from Middle English skriken, shrichen, schrichen (1250), from Old English (attested as scriccettan) and Old Norse skríkja, both from Proto-Germanic *skrīkijaną (compare Icelandic skríkja, Old Saxon scricōn, Danish skrige, Swedish skrika), derivative of *skrīhaną (compare Middle Dutch schriën,…

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 3.0