knell
Part of speech: verb
noun
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From Middle English knyllen, from Old English cnyllan (“to strike; knock; clap”), from Proto-West Germanic *knuʀlijan, from Proto-Germanic *knuzlijaną (“to beat; push; mash”), from Proto-Indo-European *gen- (“to squeeze, pinch, kink, ball up”).
Inflected forms:
form: knells
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: knelling
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: knelled
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: knelled
pos: verb
tags: past
form: knells
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: To ring a bell slowly, especially for a funeral; to toll.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: I’ll make thee sick at heart, before I leave thee,
And groan, and die indeed, and be worth nothing,
Not worth a blessing nor a bell to knell for thee […]
“[…] God!—the words of the warlock are knelling in my ears!”
The chill rain is falling, the nipt worm is crawling,
The rivers are swelling, the thunder is knelling
For the year
Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known,
Of hopes laid waste, knells in that word—ALONE!
gloss: To signal or proclaim something (especially a death) by ringing a bell.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: Let thy friends be as the dead in doom,
And build to them a final tomb;
Let the starred shade that nightly falls
Still celebrate their funerals,
And the bell of beetle and of bee
Knell their melodious memory.
The church bells knelled the peaceful ending of the day, while the purple shades of night descended sadly and majestically on the low chain of neighbouring hills.
His right hand, clenched into an iron mallet, battered desperately at the fearful face bent toward his; the beast-like teeth shattered under his blows and blood splattered, but still the red eyes gloated and the taloned fingers sank deeper and deeper until a ringing in Turlogh’s ears knelled his soul’s departure.
gloss: To summon by, or as if by, ringing a bell.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
gloss: The sound of a bell knelling; a toll (particularly one signalling a death).
pos: noun
examples: […]he is able to pierce a corselet with his eye; talks like a knell, and his hum is a battery.
I go, and it is done. The bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven or to hell.
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
gloss: A sign of the end or demise of something or someone.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
examples: But at the close of the war there was less thought of what [Britain] had retained than of what she had lost. She was parted from her American Colonies; and at the moment such a parting seemed to be the knell of her greatness.
At Ballymacarrett, the main line diverges to the right on its way to Newcastle. All services were discontinued on it in 1950, and the abandonment order finally rang the knell of faint hopes that services would be restored as far as Comber, […].
The internet sounds the knell for conventional brands, predicts Professor Alec Reed, who has set up an Academy of Enterprise to chart the emerging individual economy. By making price and other comparisons ever easier, the internet strips them of mystique and turns them into commodities.
Derived words: unknelled
death knell
soul knell
Translations: