The sound of a bell rung slowly to announce a death or a funeral or the end of something

Usage examples of knell.

Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport, And ring aloud the knell of Gaveston!

She knell heavily, feeling the cool dampness seep through her skirts to chill her knees, and scooped up a little earth in her hands, scrabbling at it, ending up with a handful of earthworms and wild violet roots for her pains.

I fold All my sons when their knell is knolled, And so with living motion all are fed, And the quick spring like weeds out of the dead.

Over the shoulders of Harry Vincent and Rufe Dodson came a whispered, mirthless laugh that carried the solemn tone of a knell.

For some time, he had speculated that putting the tailpiece to a rattlesnake inside the instrument would work a vast improvement on the sound, would give it a sizz and knell like no other.

It could have been a knell for Zune and his men who had left their impregnable lair, or possibly that tone of parting mirth was in recollection of Alban Sark, the notorious White Skull whose death had enabled The Shadow to adopt his ways and thereby put an end to his evil successors, Tanjor Zune and Philo Brenz.

A monster meeting was held on Newhall Hill, and there, in half a dozen words, Muntz sounded the knell of the new Tory Ministry.

If those who have assailed us are reduced to contemptible proportions and their Vote of Censure on the National Government is converted to a vote of censure upon its authors, make no mistake, a cheer will go up from every friend of Britain and every faithful servant of our cause, and the knell of disappointment will ring in the ears of the tyrants we are striving to overthrow.

But if, on a more extended observation, it should be found that the same ominous groups of cases clustering about individual practitioners were observed in a remote country, at different times, and in widely separated regions, it would seem incredible that any should be found too prejudiced or indolent to accept the solemn truth knelled into their ears by the funeral bells from both sides of the ocean,--the plain conclusion that the physician and the disease entered, hand in hand, into the chamber of the unsuspecting patient.

When I pulled down her eyelid and saw the dead white conjunctiva a knell sounded in my mind.

Excited shouts, cold death knell of iron, boots pounding for the doorway!

I counted, and with each numeral there came a sort of shudder, as if it had been a death knell.

They had rung the bells when King Robert died, she remembered, but this was different, no slow dolorous death knell but a joyful thunder.

Gotaro's voice sounded like a death knell to Nangi as his gaze followed his friend's lead.

His manner was so casual when he was sounding the death knell of Tara.