vesper-bell

Noun
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A bell rung in the evening, especially for church service or prayer.

Detailed Definition
The word refers to an evening bell, often associated with church time or the close of day. Coleridge uses it to suggest the approach of evening in life, but the term itself is specialized and less common in everyday modern English.
Example
Example in poetry:
“Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll’d” names the bell calling worshippers to evening prayer; Tennyson’s “toll the bell” imagery similarly makes sound mark passage into night or mourning; “The vesper-bell shook dusk from the tower” gives evening aural texture; “After the vesper-bell, the village windows bloomed” shows its role as a social and temporal signal
Additional Notes
In “Thy vesper-bell hath not yet toll'd,” the compound names a specific church-related bell that many readers would need to look up.; Found in the poem, Youth and Age by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Also Known As
evening bell twilight chime dusk toll vesper chime
Skip to main content