(n.) The stoke of a bell tolled at a funeral or at the death of a person; a death signal; a passing bell; hence, figuratively, a warning of, or a sound indicating, the passing away of anything.
(n.) To sound as a knell; especially, to toll at a death or funeral; hence, to sound as a warning or evil omen.
(v. t.) To summon, as by a knell.
Example Sentences:
(1) The BBC Trust The green paper sounds the death knell for the BBC’s current governance system in the form of the BBC Trust, which it says has come under “sustained criticism” as a result of the Savile scandal, the £100m Digital Media Initiative fiasco and excessive payoffs and salaries to BBC executives.
(2) He said: "If Heathrow builds its runway, it will be the death knell of low-cost flying for a generation."
(3) In the Commons yesterday all the former ministers were rounded on by a succession of Labour MPs claiming the moment marked the death knell of New Labour.
(4) Fashion's current preoccupation with art is effectively the death knell of the minimalist look – most art (Donald Judd and his ilk aside) is about getting messy.
(5) The return of the jihadists is likely to sound the death knell for the anti-regime opposition in north Syria.
(6) Brexit may sound the death knell for this progress.
(7) Saleh's return to Yemen after more than three months would seem to sound the death knell for the exit plan and the start of a bid to consolidate his ruling party's power base, which crumbled in his absence.
(8) You are neither the death knell for immigration reform nor the prime mover of the GOP agenda.
(9) "As such, it is highly likely the chancellor's annuity announcement will also turn out to be disastrous for first-time buyers and could represent the death knell of aspirations of homeownership for millions of young families.
(10) It will be the death knell for the whole Scottish literature "project" – a crushing denial of an identity that writers have been meticulously accumulating, trying to maintain and refine.
(11) Last Post in Iraq: this is the death knell of the American empire | George Galloway Read more Gen Bednarek adds: “The tougher issue will be, ‘what’s next?’ We must have local Sunni police and our tribes of Falluja sustain the fragile security, re-establish governance, and provide for the people,” he says.
(12) The regime’s offensive has been seen in the opposition-held north as a death knell for the UN deal, negotiated by its special envoy Staffan de Mistura, for a six-week ceasefire in the city.
(13) His comments were seen by some as sounding the death knell of the plan.
(14) And while the poll tax may be beyond the memory of most active politicians (the infamous riot that sounded its death knell took place 24 years ago this week) its consequences live on, from a contributory role in Mrs Thatcher's downfall to a massive and damaging centralisation of funding for local councils.
(15) In what some have described the death-knell for “Abenomics” – his three-arrow policy of monetary easing, fiscal stimulus and structural reform – recent currency and market turmoil have wiped out the gains made soon after he became prime minister in late 2012.
(16) However, the switch to refrigerated lorries and growth in supermarket power sounded the death knell for many of these smaller farms, with the number of dairy farmers falling from 200,000 in the 1950s to around 10,000 today.
(17) The Department of Health last month publicly sounded the death knell for Labour's ill-fated £11.4bn national programme for IT, which began in 2002 and was said to be the largest civilian computer project ever undertaken.
(18) In what was being seen in Westminster last night as the death knell of New Labour and a return to a form of traditional left-right politics, Darling became the first chancellor since the 1970s to announce income tax increases, and also scrapped Gordon Brown's fiscal rules to sanction a doubling of borrowing this year.
(19) The changing nature of the labour market in the final quarter of the 20th century sounded the death knell for the old job for life and the smooth career progression, but, says Reeves, the self-employment model characterised by WVM provided a means of upward mobility.
(20) It will not just be the death knell for the farm but the death knell for the whole community,” said Alan Davies, managing director of the FUW.
Macabre
Definition:
Example Sentences:
(1) As the last two people executed in Britain, the macabre anniversary of their deaths at Strangeways prison in Manchester and Walton prison in Liverpool is generating more publicity than their crime and punishment ever did at the time.
(2) Spectators were so closely packed that emergency services had to gather up a macabre jumble of body parts, and the final toll was never confirmed.
(3) Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘Macabre allegory’: Otto Dix’s The Triumph of Death (1934).
(4) The first season of Breaking Bad covered the story of Walter's bizarre life-switch with a tone of macabre farce.
(5) After photographs emerged on Thursday of a senior Indonesian police official posing with the prisoners aboard the plane, treasurer Joe Hockey condemned their treatment as “macabre”.
(6) The macabre track record means Karzai will be keen to ensure the elections produce a successor who will not only respect him, but keep him alive.
(7) The fact it was a killing of a child was an aggravating factor, as was his "macabre attempt to conceal her body", and his "substantial record of serious violence".
(8) You are here in the Kingdom of Death,” warns the macabre inscription at the entrance to Les Catacombes de Paris – the underground boneyard filled with the remains of 6 million Parisians, which attracts half a million living and breathing visitors each year.
(9) For that reason, The Fall starts in a comparatively restrained fashion – with Spector exploring someone's private space – stealing underwear, leaving a macabre calling card on the bed, orange peel on the table.
(10) We are seated on sofas in a cavernous, wood-floored room in his Los Angeles base, Studio Della Morte, where instruments (several gongs, a discarded accordion on the floor) compete for space with macabre props (cow skulls, dolls in various states of metamorphosis or dismemberment) and oddball paintings (a hare with boxing gloves).
(11) The notion that Raif Badawi must be allowed to heal so that he can suffer this cruel punishment again and again is macabre and outrageous.
(12) Groups of men with machetes roved the ruins seeking supplies of food or water; others used corpses as roadblocks, a macabre sign that the capital had reached breaking point after four days of apocalyptic scenes.
(13) It was almost macabre, the way this has been handled,” Hockey told Channel Seven.
(14) In the end, we never really know whether Plath was simply an accident waiting to happen, or if she could have avoided her fate, had she achieved the fame that was unfairly denied her until a burgeoning market for macabre, self-absorbed poetry opened up after her death, when being young, white, suburban and suicidal became a rite of passage, if not an outright lifestyle, on both sides of the Atlantic.
(15) "All the soldiers here didn't get support and had to fight alone," said Sifa Mirindi, an unemployed 20-year-old drawn to the macabre visitor attraction beneath the Nyiragongo volcano.
(16) For anyone who wants to play a macabre numbers game, the overall figures are still a smaller proportion than 800 Palestinian deaths out of a Gaza population of 1.8m.
(17) Abo Rabieh's images portray defiant protesters, veiled women, a detainee forced to kneel in a stress position and captors taunting their prisoners with a macabre dance of death – all drawn from everyday experience.
(18) Vincent Price, in a lip-smacking performance, plays homicidal ham actor Edward Lionheart, who rises from the grave to exact a professional and highly macabre revenge.
(19) #Brexit.” There is much to debate about the Brussels atrocity, but for it to be gleefully and so swiftly seized upon as convenient political fodder for the EU debate is macabre.
(20) After a pair of live-action hit movies in the early 90s – The Addams Family and Addams Family Values – had revived interest in Charles Addams' macabre creations, originally conceived as drawings in the New Yorker magazine, a string of cheap TV cartoons as well as a straight to video feature (Addams Family Reunion) had somewhat tarnished the brand.