BABEL • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • 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

... glitter of the avenue, The jewelled women holding parasols, The lathered horses fretting at delay, The customary afternoon blockade, The babel and the babble, the brilliant show— And then the dusky quiet of the nave. The pillared space, an organ strain that throbs Mysteriously somewhere, a rainbow shaft Shed from a saint's robe, powdering the spectral air, A workman with hard hands who bows his head, And ...

— McClure's Magazine, Vol. XXXI, No. 3, July 1908. • Various

... sympathies, but not in powers, for his powers were superior. This man grew according to the need. His mind mastered the problem of the day; and as the problem grew, so did his comprehension of it. Rarely was man so fitted to the event. In the midst of fears and jealousies, in the Babel of counsels and parties, this man wrought incessantly with all his might and all his honesty, laboring to find what the people wanted, and how to obtain that. It cannot be said there is any exaggeration of his worth. If ever a man was fairly tested, ...

— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... accumulations of private wealth. Defoe's projects were of an extremely varied kind. The classification was not strict. His spirited definition of the word "projects" included Noah's Ark and the Tower of Babel, as well as Captain Phipps's scheme for raising the wreck of a Spanish ship laden with silver. He is sometimes credited with remarkable shrewdness in having anticipated in this Essay some of the greatest public improvements of modern times—the protection of ...

— Daniel Defoe • William Minto

... however, has been "interpreted" so often, either with condescending pity or nauseous sentimentality, that it is the aim of this book to speak simply and carefully amid a babel of unauthentic utterance. Nevertheless, the contents of this volume do not pretend to exact historical accuracy; this is poetry rather than history, although the legends and facts upon which it rests have been gathered with much ...

— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen

... sun had representatives there, and the consequent confusion of tongues was equal to that of Babel. ...

— The Golden Dream - Adventures in the Far West • R.M. Ballantyne

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