knell

If “Superman” had opened to critical and commercial failure, it would have been a death knell for the modern superhero genre as we know it.

From Salon ● Jun. 27, 2026

People on the internet seem to be taking Lindy West’s memoir as millennial feminism’s final death knell.

From Slate ● Mar. 31, 2026

Now, many are wondering: Is the death knell finally tolling for the Cuban Revolution?

From Los Angeles Times ● Mar. 16, 2026

It announced, Ms. Newman writes, the “death knell to any remaining attachment to the inherited ideals of the Greek notion of beauty.”

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 26, 2025

On Old Wyk her uncle’s hellhom had blown a death knell for her dreams, and now Hagen was sounding what might well be her last hour on earth.

From "A Dance with Dragons" by George R. R. Martin

Time magazine tagged her as one of the death knells of feminism, which seems harsh.

From The Guardian ● Sep. 25, 2017

They worked for him at Modern Photography, Holiday, Travel & Leisure, Town & Country and other publications, most of them gone long before the Internet began sounding its knells for the printed page.

From New York Times ● Jun. 13, 2015

Despite the death knells, Luke Donald spent part of the year at No. 1, and after dropping to No. 3, supplanted Woods at No. 2 by December.

From Golf Digest ● Dec. 5, 2012

How many books, how many graves, knells and fevers, how many messages and signs, have ye seen? 

From The Visions of the Sleeping Bard by Robert Gwyneddon Davies

To the sobbing of the bells; keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, in a happy Runic rhyme, 4.

From Assimilative Memory or, How to Attend and Never Forget by A. (Alphonse) Loisette

I cannot guess nor tell; only it comes and comes, As from a vaster world beyond my door, From centuries of eld, the death of freedom knelled, A host of mortal fears at my door.

From Behind the Arras A Book of the Unseen by Thomas Buford Meteyard

There was no bell to toll there—but at the very moment he was ascending the scaffold, a black cloud knelled thunder, and many hundreds of people all at once fell down upon their knees.

From Recreations of Christopher North, Volume I (of 2) by John Lyde Wilson

What disaster it was that was thus knelled forth they knew not, and could hardly believe the tidings when given in articulate words.

From Great Britain and Her Queen by Annie E. Keeling

The oak and aspen arms were held Defiant, but the death was knelled Of slender saplings, snappy boughs, Twigs brittle as men's vows.

From Poems New and Old by John Freeman

Although their beating hearts with ours kept time, Although their clinging hands we fondly held, We could not walk the path they had to climb, Hardly we heard the death-call when it knelled.

From Memorial Day and Other Verse by Helen Leah Reed

In every traveler's eulogy there is a strain of elegy, and every traveler hearkens to the raven's knelling cry of "Nevermore."

From Time Magazine Archive

While many of the world's thinkers are worried about the proliferation of births, it is the knelling sound of death that keeps us awake at night.

From Time Magazine Archive

The golden bees are silent on the thymy Hymettus; and the knelling horn of Aurora’s love no more shall scatter away the cold twilight on the top of Hymettus. 

From Intentions by Oscar Wilde

If he were sighted from above, what should stay those bells from knelling for him.

From The Unknown Sea by Clemence Housman

Your husband was on the further side, knelling.

From Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward