Other forms: doorbells
A doorbell is the button visitors press to announce themselves. You hear a ding-dong somewhere inside the house.
Older ones were mechanical bells on a wire, and modern ones are wireless or connected to a camera. The word is one word and always has been. It brings a small vocabulary with it, since the doorbell rings, goes and is answered. There is a small comedy of manners around it in Britain, where an unexpected ring of the doorbell is treated with real suspicion by almost everybody.
1noundoorbellA button outside a door that sounds a bell inside.
“The doorbell went twice while she was in the bath.”
From door + bell.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Around the House, A Man Called Ove
First appears in chapter 3 of A Man Called Ove.
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