Word.ws English Dictionary

knelled

knelled is the simple past and past participle of knell.

Meaning of knell

Verb

knell (third-person singular simple present knells, present participle knelling, simple past and past participle knelled)

  1. (intransitive) To ring a bell slowly, especially for a funeral; to toll.
    • I’ll make thee sick at heart, before I leave thee,
      And groan, and die indeed, and be worth nothing,
      Not worth a blessing nor a bell to knell for thee […]1647, John Fletcher, Philip Massinger, The Spanish Curate, act V, scene 2
  2. (transitive) To signal or proclaim something (especially a death) by ringing a bell.
    • Let thy friends be as the dead in doom,
      And build to them a final tomb;
      Let the starred shade that nightly falls
      Still celebrate their funerals,
      And the bell of beetle and of bee
      Knell their melodious memory.October 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Woodnotes, Number II”, in The Dial, volume 2, number 2, page 212
  3. (transitive) To summon by, or as if by, ringing a bell.

See all 6 meanings of knell

Words formed from knelled

Questions about knelled

What is knelled the simple past and past participle of?
Knelled is the simple past and past participle of knell.

Words near knelled in the dictionary

  1. Kneipp's cure
  2. kneipping
  3. Kneippism
  4. Kneips
  5. knell
  6. knelled
  7. Kneller
  8. Knellers
  9. knelling
  10. knellings
  11. knells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: knelled (page history and authors); knell (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “knelled.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/knelled. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.