quaver
Margaret's voice was still quavery.
"What do you want?" she asked, furious with herself for producing such a high, quavery sound.
the quavery indecision of her voice
Curtis confides in a quavering voice that he's been feeling sad and lonely as one of the few college students living in a violent housing project.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Ways of talking
atonally
beg the questionidiom
blah
blither
come out
coo
pipe up
prate
spluttery
stammer
stiltedly
sweet nothings
talk nonsenseidiom
talk through your hatidiom
tattle
telegrammatic
turn of phrase
undertone
wax
witter

Examples of quavery

quavery
It came out each a quavery, hissing failure that the ones in the boat, pushing away from the sloop, peered and chuckled.
From Project Gutenberg
The thin voice suffered the quavery attrition of surprise.
From Project Gutenberg
That brought a smile to her lips--a quavery, uncertain little smile but an augury of better ones to come.
From Project Gutenberg
She looked in a recipe book, stirred, clapped her hands, sang hair-raising incantations in a quavery voice, and added a pinch of salt and sulfur.
From Project Gutenberg
Her voice rose shrill with quavery passion; she tried to steady her feeble little frame with blue-veined hands on the massive arms of her chair.
From Project Gutenberg
I repeated, with a quavery feeling just under my floating ribs, alarmed at the after-light of audacity that still rested on his face, like wine-glow on a rocky mountain-tip.
From Project Gutenberg
His call grew quavery and furtive.
From Project Gutenberg
He talked broken an' quavery, an' it took him a long time to finish; but when he did quit, he turned on his bad breathin' again.
From Project Gutenberg
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.