Rumble

How to spell rumble

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce rumble

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does rumble mean?

1. verbTo make a deep, heavy, continuous sound like distant thunder or a passing lorry.
2. nounA deep, prolonged, rolling sound.

Rumble in a sentence

• verb

  Thunder began to rumble across the valley as the storm moved in.

• noun

  A distant rumble of thunder warned the hikers to turn back.

• verb

  An empty stomach can rumble loudly during a quiet meeting.

• noun

  The low rumble of the engine reassured the mechanic that it was running well.

Where does rumble come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Rumble first appears in English in the late 1300s as the Middle English romblen, meaning to make a low, heavy, rolling sound. It is widely held to be imitative, an echoic word coined to mimic the very noise it describes, and it has close cousins in the Dutch rommelen and the German rummeln, both of which carry the same sense of a continuous low roar. The little -le ending is a frequentative suffix, the same one that turns crack into crackle and spark into sparkle; it signals a sound that keeps repeating rather than happening once. Over the centuries the word broadened from the noise of thunder, carts, and empty stomachs to a noun for the sound itself, and in twentieth-century American slang it picked up the meaning of a street brawl between rival groups. Because the spelling is so regular and the silent letters are absent, the main thing to remember is the simple -ble ending shared with tumble, fumble, and grumble.

How the word is built

• rumb- (imitative of a low rolling sound)
• -le (frequentative verb suffix denoting repeated action)