the.com/knell
The sound a bell makes when it knows something you don't yet.
means A slow, mournful bell toll that signals death or a doom-laden ending — and by extension, any ominous sign that something is finished for good.
from From Old English 'cnyll,' rooted in a Germanic imitative base — one of those words born simply from mimicking the sound itself, the dull low strike of metal on metal. It's a cousin, loosely, of 'knock' and 'clang,' part of a family of words that just copy noise into language. By the time it settled into English, 'knell' had narrowed from any bell-stroke to specifically the tolling that announces a death — the sound, not the bell, carrying the dread.
- origin
- Old English cnyll, mimicking the toll itself
- usage
- Almost always funeral, rarely birthday
- idiom
- death knell means the end is audible
- cousin word
- related to knock, not to bell