din
nounverbnounattested in dialogue
- //dɪn//
A loud noise; a cacophony or loud commotion.
noun
- 1
A loud noise; a cacophony or loud commotion.
din and bustle
Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?
[B]red to war, / He knew the battle’s din afar, / And joyed to hear it swell.
How often, hither wandering down, My Arthur found your shadows fair, And shook to all the liberal air The dust and din and steam of town:
Etymology
From Middle English dyne, dynne, from Old English dyne, from Proto-West Germanic *duni, from Proto-Germanic *duniz, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰún-is, from *dʰwen- (“to make a noise”). Cognate with English tone, Sanskrit धुनि (dhúni, “sounding”), ध्वनति (dhvánati, “to make a noise, to roar”), Old Norse dynr, Norwegian Nynorsk dynja, Swedish dån, dön.
verb
- 1
To make a din, to resound.
1820, William Wordsworth, “The Waggoner” Canto 2, in The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Volume 2, p. 21, For, spite of rumbling of the wheels, A welcome greeting he can hear;— It is a fiddle in its glee Dinning from the CHERRY TREE!
My confused senses received a dull roar of pounding feet and dinning voices as the herald of victory.
Should she speak of having been at the fire herself—or should she not? The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear what her companion was saying […]
Those who slept that Sunday night in the Juvenile Shelter were wakened next morning by a bell dinning up and down the corridors[.]
- 2
(of a place) To be filled with sound, to resound.
The room was dinning with the strains of an invisible orchestra and the vocal uproar […]
- 3
To assail (a person, the ears) with loud noise.
1716, Joseph Addison, The Free-Holder: or Political Essays, London: D. Midwinter & J. Tonson, No. 8, 16 January, 1716, pp. 45-46, She ought in such Cases to exert the Authority of the Curtain Lecture; and if she finds him of a rebellious Disposition, to tame him, as they do Birds of Prey, by dinning him in the Ears all Night long.
Oh ye! whose ears are dinn’d with uproar rude, Or fed too much with cloying melody,— Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth, and brood Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!
No alarm-clock dinned her to get up but the morning light woke her, pouring through the uncurtained glass.
- 4
To repeat (something) continuously, as though to the point of deafening or exhausting somebody, or (sometimes particularly) to impress or instill (it, into someone).
This has been often dinned in my Ears.
“Mamma, do you forget that I have promised to marry Roger Hamley?” said Cynthia quietly. “No! of course I don’t—how can I, with Molly always dinning the word ‘engagement’ into my ears? […]”
By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.
His mother had dinned The Whole Duty of Man into him in early childhood.
Etymology
From Middle English dynnen, from Old English dynnan, from Proto-Germanic *dunjaną, from Proto-Indo-European *dʰwen- (“to make a noise”).
noun
- 1
Variant of deenAlternative spelling of deen (“religion, faith, religiosity”).
Forms
- plural
- dins
- past tense
- dinned
- past participle
- dinned
- present participle
- dinning
- third person singular
- dins