Usage examples for wail:

• Her mother and the women who had assembled from the neighborhood, then set up a terrific shriek, like a funeral wail She's lost! "The Women of the Arabs" – Henry Harris Jessup

• Whereupon the Indians set up a wail of grief. "This Country Of Ours" – H. E. Marshall Author: Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall

• I heaved, bent it backward, backward till it screamed, a high wail "The Door Through Space" – Marion Zimmer Bradley