Word.ws English Dictionary

table bell

table bell noun: a hand-held bell intended to be rung in a dining room to call for service, but also used to call patients in medical clinics, assistants in offices, etc.

table bell: a hand-held bell intended to be rung in a dining room to call for service, but also used to call...
Image: Johann Martin Satzger I, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

table bell (plural table bells)

  1. (historical) A hand-held bell intended to be rung in a dining room to call for service, but also used to call patients in medical clinics, assistants in offices, etc.
    • It is more awful and alarming, thus to startle silence by a deep-toned summoner, than to be brought back into petty life, by the tinkle of a table-bell.1825, James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, page 415
    • […] we were waited upon by a tall, very tall woman, young and maiden-looking, yet with a strongly outlined and determined face. Afterwards we found her to be the wife of mine host. She poured out our tea, came in when we rang the table-bell to refill our cups, and again retired.1837, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Passages from the American Note-Books, volume 1, published ca. 1868, page 61

Examples of table bell in a sentence

  • […] they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand and two wasn’t ready.1924, Ford Madox Ford, chapter 6, in Some Do Not ..., page 159:
  • Suddenly Miss Digger looked drunk, rang the table bell drunkenly and without asking Mr.1935, Hsi Tseng Tsiang, chapter 9, in The Hanging on Union Square:

Forms of table bell

pluraltable bells

Questions about table bell

What does table bell mean?
Table bell means a hand-held bell intended to be rung in a dining room to call for service, but also used to call patients in medical clinics, assistants in offices, etc.
How do you use table bell in a sentence?
[…] they ran about corridors or frantically rang table bells, asking with high voices of querulous eunuchs why form ninety thousand and two wasn’t ready.
What part of speech is table bell?
Table bell is a noun.
What is the plural of table bell?
The plural of table bell is table bells.

Words near table bell in the dictionary

  1. Table Bay
  2. table beer
  3. table beers
  4. table beet
  5. table beets
  6. table bell
  7. table bells
  8. table bird
  9. table birds
  10. table board
  11. table boarder

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: table bell (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: “table bell.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/table_bell. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.