Usage Note: The literal meaning of the verb roil is “to make muddy or cloudy by stirring up sediment,” and this meaning has given rise to a number of figurative uses including “to be agitated” and “to cause to be agitated.” Not surprisingly, the synonymous verb rile actually began its existence as a variant of roil. It appears that the success of rile has actually come at the expense of roil, to the point where what would once have been unremarkable usages of roil now seem wrong to many readers. In our 2017 survey, 27 percent of the Usage Panel rejected the sentence The controversy continued to roil just two days before the primaries, in which figurative roil is used intransitively; 36 percent of the Usage Panel rejected transitive roil in the sentence The lyrics of the song roiled some Asian students, who felt they were racist, and 59 percent rejected the phrasal verb roil up in the sentence The administration's comments have roiled up the university's professors, who felt the administration was declaring war on tenure. Nor was it only in figurative use that the Panel found roil problematic. The literal, intransitive use of the word to mean “to move turbulently” in the sentence It was like wading through surf when a mountainous breaker is roiling toward you was judged unacceptable by 62 percent of the Panel. According to most dictionaries, all these uses should be acceptable. The survey results suggest then that many people see these uses of roil as malapropisms for rile. Writers who count themselves in this number can use a synonym like upset or agitate for the transitive uses or boil or roll for the intransitive ones.