Other forms: bellows, bellowing, bellowed
To bellow is to shout from the bottom of your chest — a huge, deep, rolling noise that arrives before the words do. A sergeant bellowing across a parade ground; a bull bellowing in a field two hills away.
Bellow belongs to big lungs: bulls, elephants, and furious people. It is low and heavy, and that is what separates it from a scream or a shriek, which are high and thin. You bellow at someone, bellow orders, bellow a name down a corridor. It works as a noun too — a bellow of laughter, a bellow of pain. Keep it apart from bellows, with an s, which is the leather bag you squeeze to push air into a fire; the two come off the same old root, and both are about air forced out under pressure.
1verbbellowTo shout in a deep, loud voice.~33%
“He bellowed at the children to get down off the wall.”
2verbbullOf a bull or other large animal, to make a deep roaring cry.~56%
“A bull bellowed somewhere beyond the trees.”
3nounloudA deep, loud shout or roar.~11%
“She heard his bellow from the far end of the corridor.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 64 sentences found in the wild and placed 9 of them on a sense (55 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
bellow is a shout.
b-ELLOW → hELLO
A bull leans over the gate and says hello. It comes out as a wall of sound that flattens the grass, lifts the hat off your head and rolls away down the valley.
hooks ontohello
The root behind it, *bʰel-, meant to sound, to roar — and to swell. Old English kept a whole set of it at once: bellan, to roar; belgan, to swell with rage; belg, a leather bag. Billow and bulge come off the same root. A bellow is air swelling up inside something until it has to come out.
Proto-Indo-European
*bʰel- — to sound, roar
Old English
belgan
Middle English
belwen
English, today
bellow
Built from
From Middle English belwen, from Old English belgan, bylgan (“to become angry, to swell with rage”), ultimately from the Proto-Indo-European bʰel- (“to sound, roar”), whence also belg (“leather bag”), bellan (“to roar”), blāwan (“to blow”). Cognate with German bellen (“to bark”), Russian бле́ять (“baa, bleat”). Compare billow (“wave”), of the same root, also bulge, with related etymology to swelling. Potentially related to bawl, Swedish böl (“bawl”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA