BABEL • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Babel

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/bˈæbəl/ Listen

noun

Babel n.

The city and tower in the land of Shinar, where the confusion of languages took place. "Therefore is the name of it called Babel."

Hence: A place or scene of noise and confusion; a confused mixture of sounds, as of voices or languages. "That babel of strange heathen languages." "The grinding babel of the street".

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Etymology of 'Babel'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Babel" Quotes from Famous Books

... came too late. His Highness had only time enough to hurry the birch wood into the box and bang down the cover before flying footsteps filled the house, maids appeared from every door, and there was a blast of wind, a babel of voices, and the discomfited boy found himself face ...

— Walter and the Wireless • Sara Ware Bassett

... its coldest admirers. He ransacked the myths and legends of various nations, and dwelt upon the stories of giants and demi-gods with scarcely less enthusiasm than if discoursing on the building of Babel or on the gift of the law on Sinai. Herder disliked the theories of Kant with cordial aversion. Of course the Koenigsberg sage had nothing in common with the Weimar rhapsodist. Had Herder only given a prominence to his belief in the fact of inspiration ...

— History of Rationalism Embracing a Survey of the Present State of Protestant Theology • John F. Hurst

... her mother's sitting-room in the midst of what seemed a babel of voices. James Coryston, indeed, who was sitting in a corner of the room while Coryston and Sir Wilfrid Bury argued across him, was not contributing to it. He was watching his mother, and she on the other side of the room was talking rapidly to her son Arthur, who could evidently ...

— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... slave-States." But the disavowal did not relieve him from Southern enmity. The fire-eaters seized the pretext to charge him with all manner of "abolition" intentions, and by violent debate and the utterance of threats of disunion made the House a parliamentary and almost a revolutionary babel for nearly two months. Certain appropriations were exhausted, and the treasury was in great need of funds. Efforts were made to adopt the plurality rule, and to choose a Speaker for a limited period; but every such movement ...

— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay

... unintelligible, to our fellows. It has not seldom occurred to me (noting how in our national legislature everything runs to talk, as lettuces, if the season or the soil be unpropitious, shoot up lankly to seed, instead of forming handsome heads) that Babel was the first Congress, the earliest mill erected for the manufacture of gabble. In these days, what with Town Meetings, School Committees, Boards (lumber) of one kind and another, Congresses, Parliaments, Diets, ...

— The Biglow Papers • James Russell Lowell

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