single word requests - Interjection for the sound of a bell - English . . . That is an interesting question in its own right - what part of speech is "boom!"? If a human would exclaim it, I believe it would be an interjection If a bell produces the sound, is it still an interjection? What I meant by the question is that I wasn't looking for a noun ("a ringing") or verb ("to ring") The noun, verb and interjection (?) could all be said to be onomatopoetic, as far as I
etymology - What is the origin of rings a bell? - English Language . . . For example, he struck a bell when the dogs were fed If the bell was sounded in close association with their meal, the dogs learnt to associate the sound of the bell with food After a while, at the mere sound of the bell, they responded by drooling Another possible origin is the one this page advocates:
A figure of speech to illustrate the irreversibility of an action Personally I like "You can't unring that bell" as deadrat mentioned above The phrase refers to the fact that you can't un-hear a bell that has been rung There's a nice essay about its history here: Unring the Bell (impossibility of taking back a statement or action)
What caused bell peppers to be called capsicums in some countries? A person working in an Indian supermarket was shocked when I told her it's called Bell Pepper in the US, UK, Canada and Ireland I had to pull out Wikipedia to convince her it was true (Probably because she associated pepper with the spice ) What is the historical etymological explanation for this divergence in names between countries?
What is the origin of giving [it] the old college try? Here's a citation from 1917: courtesy of a wordorigins discussion of this very question: A newspaper column by that title by Billy Sunday which has a 1917 copyright by The Bell Syndicate Inc Appears in an Elyria Ohio paper October of 1918 Actually, the evangelist puts the expression on the lips of the great Giants manager John McGraw who after watching an rookie outfielder just out of
grammar - Why go off, as in alarm went off? - English Language . . . The picture is that the alarm is loud (a siren, bell, etc) and indicates danger of some sort In a computer system, an "alarm" might simply be a light or a sentence printed, but the mental picture still applies A light "goes on", so you might even see an indicator light "go on" indicating that an alarm has "gone off"