ETYM AS. belle, from bellan to bellow. Related to Bellow.
(Homonym: bel, Bel, belle).
1. A hollow device made of metal that makes a ringing sound when struck.
2. The shape of a bell; SYN. bell shape, campana.
3. The sound of a bell.
4. The flared opening of a tubular device.
5. (Nautical) Each of the eight half-hour units of nautical time signaled by strokes of a ship's bell; eight bells signals 4:00, 8:00, or 12:00 o'clock, either a.m. or p.m.; SYN. ship's bell.

ETYM AS. bellan. Related to Bellow.
To attach a bell to.

(1940-) Australian actor and theatrical director. In 1970 he became the founding artistic director of the Nimrod Theatre, Sydney, where he developed a distinctive style, particularly with his productions of Shakespeare.

(1851-1936) New Zealand politician, prime minister 1925. He was attorney-general 1918–26 and minister for external affairs 1923–26, being best known in the international sphere as New Zealand delegate to League of Nations conferences and to the Imperial Conference 1928.

(1919-) US sociologist. He was editor of the report Toward the Year 2000 1968, which reflects his interest in contemporary history and social forecasting. In The End of Ideology 1960, he tried to show how the West, as a result of welfare state and mixed economy, had come to the “end of the ideological age”.
Bell claimed the conflict between ideologies was to be seen mainly in developing countries or on the international stage. In The Radical Right 1963 he offered an explanation of the anticommunist hysteria triggered by Senator Joe McCarthy in terms of the extremities of minorities that had not adjusted to pluralistic society. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society underlined his view of the importance of scientific and technical knowledge in social and political life and predicted greater power for scientific elites.
He taught at Columbia University 1958–69, when he became professor of sociology at Harvard University. Before his appointment to the academic staff at Columbia, he had been a journalist on the magazine Fortune.

(1774-1842) Scottish anatomist and surgeon who carried out pioneering research on the human nervous system. He gave his name to Bell’s palsy, an extracranial paralysis of the facial nerve, and to the long thoracic nerve of Bell, which supplies a muscle in the chest wall.
Bell was born in Edinburgh and became a surgeon at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, having learned from his surgeon brother John Bell (1763–1820). Charles went to London 1804, held various academic posts, and returned to Edinburgh 1836 as professor of surgery.
Bell discovered that nerves are composite structures, each with separate fibers for sensory and motor functions. His findings first appeared 1811; his main written work was The Nervous System of the Human Body 1830.

(1847-1922) Scottish-born US scientist and inventor, the first person ever to transmit speech from one point to another by electrical means. This invention—the telephone—was made 1876. Later Bell experimented with a type of phonograph and, in aeronautics, invented the tricycle undercarriage.
Bell also invented a photophone, which used selenium crystals to apply the telephone principle to transmitting words in a beam of light. He thus achieved the first wireless transmission of speech.
Born in Edinburgh, Bell was educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London and studied under his father, who developed a method for teaching the deaf to speak. In 1870 the family moved to Canada and Bell came to the US, where he opened a school 1872 for teachers of the deaf in Boston. In 1873 he began teaching vocal physiology at Boston University. He became a US citizen 1882.
Bell also worked on converting seawater to drinking water and on air conditioning and sheep breeding.
Bell was born in Edinburgh, where his grandfather was a speech tutor. As a boy he constructed an automaton simulating the human organs of speech, using rubber, cotton, and a bellows. He was educated at the universities of Edinburgh and London, and in 1870 went first to Canada and then to the US, where he opened a school for teachers of the deaf in Boston and in 1873 became professor of vocal physiology at the university. With the money he had made from his telephone system, Bell set up a laboratory in Nova Scotia, Canada; in 1880 he established, in addition, the Volta Laboratory in Washington, DC.
There, Bell patented the phonograph and wax recording cylinder, which were commercially successful improvements on Thomas Edison's first phonograph and cylinders of metal foil. The laboratory also experimented with flat disc records, electroplating records, and impressing permanent magnetic fields on records—the embryonic tape recorder.
In 1881, Bell developed two telephonic devices for locating metallic masses (usually bullets) in the human body. One, an induction balance method, was first tried out on President Garfield, who was assassinated that year, while the other, a probe, was widely used until the advent of X-rays. Bell also built hydrofoil speedboats and tetrahedral kites capable of carrying a person. He invented an air-cooling system, a way of desalinating sea water, the forerunner of the iron lung, and a sorting machine for punch-coded census cards.

1. City in California (USA).
2. Town in Florida (USA); zip code 32619.

(part of instrument) In a wind instrument, the flat disc or flare at the opposite end of the tube from the mouthpiece.
In woodwind instruments, it acts as a shaped baffle controlling the expanding pressure wave emitted from the bell when all the finger holes are closed (at higher pitches pressure escapes from the highest open hole). In brass instruments, it also acts as a directional radiator, the thin metal vibrating with the variation between the escaping sound and atmospheric pressure.Musical instrument, made in many sizes, comprising a suspended resonating vessel swung by a handle or from a pivoted frame to make contact with a beater which hangs inside the bell. Church bells are among the most massive structures to be cast in bronze in one piece; from high up in a steeple they can be heard for many miles. Their shape, a flared bowl with a thickened rim, is engineered to produce a clangorous mixture of tones. Miniature handbells are tuned to resonate harmoniously. Orchestral tubular bells, of brass or steel, are tuned to a chromatic scale of pitches and are played by striking with a wooden mallet. A set of steeple bells played from a keyboard is called a carillon.
The world’s largest bell is the “Tsar Kolokol” or “King of Bells”, 220 metric tons, cast 1734, which stands on the ground of the Kremlin, Moscow, where it fell when being hung. The “Peace Bell” at the United Nations headquarters, New York, was cast 1952 from coins presented by 64 countries.