Meaning
Loud, powerful, booming - said of voices built for crowds and emergencies. By extension it describes anything addressed to a whole room at once: the stentorian announcement, the stentorian schoolmaster. Formal-comic register: it praises volume with a raised eyebrow; the two-line Homer career and the lost shouting match with Hermes are the entry's best footnotes. Regional use: General English; classical origin.
Origin
Stentor appears in the Iliad for exactly two lines - a herald of the Greek forces whose voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men - and Hera borrows his form to shout the Achaeans back into battle. Antiquity gave him a fitting death: later tradition, the scholia and Eustathius record, had him challenge Hermes to a shouting match and lose, which is why he never reappears; Aristotle was already using him as the measure of loudness, asking in the Politics who could be herald of a vast multitude unless he have the voice of a Stentor. English formed the adjective in his honour - a fox-hunting squire's stentorian voice in an 1842 novel, Edgar Rice Burroughs's stentorian tones in 1918, Joyce's stentorian notes in Ulysses' Cyclops episode of 1922, Faulkner's curious not loud yet stentorian in 1934 - and Wiktionary adds the extended sense, stern and demanding of respect.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- in stentorian fashion
- stentorian tones
- stentorian voice
Usage Examples
- The ferry master's stentorian 'Last call!' carried over two car decks and most of the harbour.
- Her stentorian rendering of the roll call made substitute teachers weep with relief.
- The auctioneer was stentorian by trade and, at home behind closed doors, mercifully quiet.