/nɛl/, /nel/
OriginFrom 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”).
- intransitiveTo ring a bell slowly, especially for a funeral; to toll.
“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”
- transitiveTo signal or proclaim something (especially a death) by ringing a bell.
“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”
“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 gloa”
- transitiveTo summon by, or as if by, ringing a bell.
- The sound of a bell knelling; a toll (particularly one signalling a death).
“[…]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,”
- figurativelyA sign of the end or demise of something or someone.
“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 th”
“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 servi”
“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 compari”
Formsknells(present, singular, third-person) · knelling(participle, present) · knelled(participle, past) · knelled(past) · knells(plural) · Knells(plural)
Source: Wiktionary