murmurous

From murmur +‎ -ous.

• IPA^(key): /ˈmɜː(ɹ).mə.ɹəs/, /ˈmɜː(ɹ)m.ɹəs/

murmurous (comparative more murmurous, superlative most murmurous)

1. Low, indistinct (of a sound); reminiscent of a murmur.
   • 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto XI”, in The Faerie Queene. , London: [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     Like as a fire, the which in hollow cave
     Hath long bene underkept, and down supprest,
     With murmurous disdaine doth inly rave,
     And grudge, in so streight prison to be prest,

     London: Constable & Co., 1919, p. 202,

   • 1818–1819, John Keats, “Hyperion, a Fragment”, in Lamia, Isabella, the Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, London: [Thomas Davison] for Taylor and Hessey, , published 1820, →OCLC, page 193:

     Throughout all the isle
     There was no covert, no retired cave
     Unhaunted by the murmurous noise of waves,
     Though scarcely heard in many a green recess.

   • 1916 December 29, James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, New York, N.Y.: B[enjamin] W. Huebsch, →OCLC:

     He felt some dark presence moving irresistably upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself.

     New York: B.W. Huebsch, 1922, p. 112,

   • 1917, William Carlos Williams, “Good Night”, in Al Que Quiere‎, Boston: The Four Seas Company, page 43:

     Waiting, with a glass in my hand
     —three girls in crimson satin
     pass close before me on
     the murmurous background of
     the crowded opera—

   • 1920, Wilfred Owen, “Spring Offensive”, in Poems‎, London: Chatto & Windus, page 20:

     Marvelling they stood, and watched the long grass swirled
     By the May breeze, murmurous with wasp and midge,

   • 1921, E. E. Cummings, “Puella Mea”, in George J. Firmage, editor, Complete Poems, 1904-1962, New York: Liveright, published 1991, page 21:

     And if she speaks in her frail way,
     it is wholly to bewitch
     my smallest thought with a most swift
     radiance wherein slowly drift
     murmurous things divinely bright;

   • 1924, Herman Melville, chapter 23, in Billy Budd‎, London: Constable & Co.:

     The seeming remoteness of its source was because of its murmurous indistinctness since it came from close-by, even from the men massed on the ship's open deck.

   • 1959, Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable, in The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy; Malone Dies; The Unnamable, London: Calder, 1994, p. 397,

     It will be the same silence, the same as ever, murmurous with muted lamentation, panting and exhaling of impossible sorrow, like distant laughter, and brief spells of hush, as of one buried before his time.

• murmurously
• murmurousness