Definition of "knell" []

• To ring slowly and solemnly, especially for a funeral; toll. (verb-intransitive)
• To give forth a mournful or ominous sound. (verb-intransitive)
• To signal, summon, or proclaim by tolling. (verb-transitive)
• The sound of a bell knelling; a toll. (noun)
• A signal of disaster or destruction. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and buried it "with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which Christmas begins.""
• "When they had gone from house to house and collected all the money they could, they laid the wren on a bier and carried it in procession to the parish churchyard, where they made a grave and buried it “with the utmost solemnity, singing dirges over her in the Manks language, which they call her knell; after which Christmas begins."
• "In another moment it forged slowly past me, tolling as it were a death knell from the engine-bell and associating in my mind spectral tableaux of horrible collisions and mangled dead."