Stentor2
(ˈstɛntɔː(r))
[Gr. στέντωρ, Hom. Iliad v. 785.]
1. The name of a Greek warrior in the Trojan war, ‘whose voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men’; applied allusively to a man of powerful voice.
| 1600 Nashe Summer's Last Will F 3 b, Those mountaines are the houses of great Lords, Where Stentor with his hundreth voices sounds A hundreth trumpes at once with rumor fild. 1609 B. Jonson Sil. Wom. iv. ii, Rogues, Hell-hounds, Stentors, out of my doores, you sonnes of noyse and tumult. c 1611 Chapman Iliad To Rdr., Brutish noises..Are bellow'd-out, and cracke the barbarous voices Of Turkish Stentors. 1748 Smollett Rod. Rand. v, [He] bawled out, ‘Murder! thieves!’ with the voice of a Stentor. 1840 Dickens Old C. Shop i, Laughing like a stentor, Kit gradually backed to the door, and roared himself out. 1870 R. Brough Marston Lynch x. 90 She roared the..words through her hands with the lungs of a stentor. |
‖ 2. [mod.L.] A genus of Protozoa; an individual of this genus, a trumpet-shaped protozoan.
| 1863 Wood Illustr. Nat. Hist. III. 766 The second figure represents the Stentor, so called because its general shape bears some resemblance to that of a speaking-trumpet. 1875 Hardwicke's Sci.-Gossip XI. 160/2, I found it to consist of an immense assemblage of stentors, apparently Stentor polymorpha, imbedded in a mass of dirty-looking jelly. |
3. A platyrrhine monkey of the South American genus Mycetes.
| 1891 Century Dict. |
4. attrib. with the meaning ‘stentorian’.
| 1837 Carlyle Fr. Rev. I. iii. iii, Where Mirabeau is now, with stentor-lungs, ‘denouncing Agio.’ Ibid. III. i. iv, ‘Legislators!’ so speaks the stentor-voice. |