Nevada County Picayune and Gurdon Times Newspaper Archive

Word of the Week

As your vocabulary of sesquipedalian words increases, you will hear such wonderfully familiar words like mellifluous and quintessence and the very sound of them will tintinnabulate in your ears. Ah, the sweet melody!

Tintinnabulate, you ask quizzically? Please forgive me!

Let me introduce you to an old friend of mine. This proud old word has kept some rich company throughout history, even though one numbered in that group was Poe. But more on that in a moment.

The verb tintinnabulate shares its roots with the noun tintinnabulation. It comes from the Latin word tintinnabulum, which means a bell. To tintinnabulate means to ring or sound like a small bell, whereas tintinnabulation refers to the sound of the tinkling sound, as of a bell or bells.

Let me introduce you to my Poe friend  Edgar Allan, that is. Here is Poes poem from 1849. It is titled "The Bells."

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.

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.