tintinnabulation

n.
The ringing or sounding of bells.

[From TINTINNABULUM.]

Origin: 1845

While uncouth boosters and boasters on the frontier were adding the likes of skedaddle, Sockdolager (1827), and splendacious to the American vocabulary, members of the literary elite contributed an invention of their own: tintinnabulation. It doesn't exactly ring a bell with Americans today--except, perhaps, with readers of Edgar Allan Poe. "Hear the sledges with the bells-- / Silver bells! / What a world of merriment their melody foretells!" begins Poe's poem "The Bells." In the night, Poe says, the stars twinkle, "Keeping time, time, time, / In a sort of Runic rhyme, / To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells from the bells, bells, bells, bells, / Bells, bells, bells...." Only these sleighbells tintinnabulate; the wedding bells, fire bells, and funeral bells later in the poem make other sounds.

The poem was published in 1849, the year Poe died. But tintinnabulation was already making the rounds of the American literary community in 1845, when a theology student at Princeton, W. W. Lord, having just published a book entitled Poems, wrote to the literary critic Elizabeth Kinney in nearby Newark, New Jersey, "Others bore a distinct resemblance to the tintinnabulations of jingled cow bells." Poe was not one of Lord's admirers; in a review in the Broadway Journal of May 24, 1845, he said that Lord's Poems showed "a very ordinary species of talent." And Lord's letter to Kinney was not published, so it is unlikely Poe would have read tintinnabulation there. The word must have been in the air when he wrote his own poem on bells a few years later.

Similar words had been used in England before this time: tintinnabular and tintinnabulary, "pertaining to bells," since the eighteenth century, and tintinnabulant for "ringing or tinkling" since early in the nineteenth. But tintinnabulation was an American invention. Thanks to Poe, it has been ringing in our ears ever since.

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the ringing or sounding of bells; a jingling or tinkling sound

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: the sound of a bell ringing
  Synonyms: ring, ringing

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Dansk (Danish)
n. - klinglen, ringen, ringlen

Nederlands (Dutch)
gerinkel

Français (French)
n. - son de cloche

Deutsch (German)
n. - Klingeln von Glocken

Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - καμπάνισμα, κουδούνισμα

Italiano (Italian)
tintinnio

Português (Portuguese)
n. - tintinabulação (f), tilintar de campainha

Русский (Russian)
звон колокольчиков

Español (Spanish)
n. - tintineo

Svenska (Swedish)
n. - klockringning

中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
铃响声

中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 鈴響聲

한국어 (Korean)
n. - 따르릉 울리는 소리

日本語 (Japanese)
n. - チリンチリン

العربيه (Arabic)
‏(الاسم) رنين ألأجراس,‏

עברית (Hebrew)
n. - ‮צלצול, דנדון פעמונים‬

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