Verb
“You should never have done that,” she scolded.
he scolded the kids for not cleaning up the mess they had made in the kitchen Noun
He can be a bit of a scold sometimes.
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Verb
As the Sentinel’s Cristobal Reyes has reported, federal judges based in Orlando have scolded prosecutors multiple times in recent weeks for detaining people who should have been set free, with one judge memorably comparing the current actions of ICE to those of a third-world country.—Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board, The Orlando Sentinel, 8 Feb. 2026 Young kids paddled near the shallow edges and bigger kids jumped off the cliffs above the swimming hole, causing the adults to gasp and scold.—Hazlitt, 4 Feb. 2026
Noun
After trying out a shot in the fourth episode in which Kim smiled, barely perceptibly, while watching Jimmy pull off a stunt, the creators settled into the idea that her character wasn’t a scold but was turned on by Jimmy’s shenanigans — and could be a surprising and active ally.—Jackson McHenry, Vulture, 15 Dec. 2025 With trigger-warning culture on the wane and a brutish permissiveness creeping back into society, corporate scolds have lost much of their power.—Liz Hoffman, semafor.com, 2 Sep. 2025 See All Example Sentences for scold
Word History
Etymology
Noun
Middle English scald, scold, perhaps of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse skāld poet, skald, Icelandic skālda to make scurrilous verse