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

While such a selloff might have been a death knell in years past, it has done little to ease Wall Street’s appetite for crypto.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 17, 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

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

After the psalmodies, the bells, the peals, and knells and offices, the sound of these little girls burst forth on a sudden more sweetly than the noise of bees.

From Les Misérables by Isabel Florence Hapgood

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

Lost, lost! one moment knelled the woe of years.

From Familiar Quotations A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs Traced to Their Sources in Ancient and Modern Literature by John Bartlett

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

Then the mournful answer knelled to her heart, and the recurrent spasms of that first agony slowly, surely settled into one dead pain, as the truth was seared into her knowledge.

From Children of the Mist by Eden Phillpotts

To-morrow—” He fell silent; again in his heart that parting cadence knelled with keen and intolerable sorrow.

From Stepsons of Light by Eugene Manlove Rhodes

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

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

"Beloved, hear'st thou that distant wail, That sad and mournful knelling?"

From Tales of the Wonder Club Volume I by M. Y. Halidom

The stillness became intolerable; yet more intolerable the sound that alone broke it, the voice of the clock, knelling moment after moment to its grave.

From Zanoni by Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron Lytton

Hounds are in their couples yelling, Hawks are whistling, horns are knelling, Merrily, merrily, mingle they— "Waken, lords and ladies gay."

From The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume I. The Songs of Scotland of the past half century by Charles Rogers