Sonorous

səˈnɔːrəs

adjective

producing sound, especially deep and rich

The word 'sonorous' is often used to describe sounds that are full, deep, and rich in tone. It can evoke a sense of richness and depth in the auditory experience.

The language that they had made was unlike all others: slow, sonorous, agglomerated, repetitive, indeed long-winded; formed of a multiplicity of vowel-shades and distinctions of tone and quality which even the lore-masters of the Eldar had not attempted to represent in writing.

J. R. R. Tolkien

The Return of the King

Queen Daenerys shall be found.” A tall Ghiscari in a brocade robe spoke next, in a voice as sonorous as it was cold.

George R. R. Martin

A Dance with Dragons: A Song of Ice and Fire: Book Five

He took the guitar a little above the fingerboard, arching his left elbow with a somewhat theatrical gesture, and, with a wink at Anísya Fëdorovna, struck a single chord, pure and sonorous, and then quietly, smoothly, and confidently began playing in very slow time, not “My Lady,” but the well-known song: “Came a maiden down the street.” The tune, played with precision and in exact time, began to thrill in the hearts of Nikoláy and Natásha, arousing in them the same kind of sober mirth as radiated from Anísya Fëdorovna’s whole being.

Leo Tolstoy

War and Peace

With night lying over the unnaturally quiet city, the faint, howling voice had seemed sonorous and dark, the voice of a lunatic Jeremiah floating through the streets of Manhattan, echoing, rebounding, distorting.

King, Stephen

The Stand

Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waistcoat, as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and evanescence of the brisk fire.

Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities

The slow march began, sonorous with its ancient pomp, and Feyd-?Rautha led his troupe across the arena for obeisance at the foot of his uncle’s box.

Herbert, Frank

Dune

He was Foreign Secretary in the mayor’s cabinet, and to all the outer suns, barring only the Foundation itself, he was, in addition, Primate of the Church, Purveyor of the Holy Food, Master of the Temples, and so forth almost indefinitely in confusing but sonorous syllables.

Asimov, Isaac

Foundation 1 - Foundation

Opening it, she proceeded to force the painting inside, and despite the fact that it was patently too large to fit inside the tiny bag, within a few seconds it had vanished, like so much else, into the bag’s capacious depths.“Phineas Nigellus,” Hermione explained as she threw the bag onto the kitchen table with the usual sonorous, clanking crash.“Sorry?” said Ron, but Harry understood.

J. K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Octavoes.3—These embrace the whales of middling magnitude, among which present may be numbered:—I, the “Grampus”; II, the “Black Fish”; III, the “Narwhale”; IV, the “Thrasher”; V, the “Killer.” Book II (“Octavo”), chapter I (“Grampus”).—Though this fish, whose loud sonorous breathing, or rather blowing, has furnished a proverb to landsmen, is so well known a denizen of the deep, yet is he not popularly classed among whales.

Herman Melville

Moby Dick

Oh, my little Fairy!” But instead of these words a bray came from his throat, so sonorous and so prolonged that all the spectators laughed, and more especially all the children who were in the theater.

Carlo Collodi

The Adventures of Pinocchio

His body seemed to acquire an airy lightness, his perception brightened in a remarkable manner, his senses seemed to redouble their power, the horizon continued to expand; but it was not the gloomy horizon of vague alarms, and which he had seen before he slept, but a blue, transparent, unbounded horizon, with all the blue of the ocean, all the spangles of the sun, all the perfumes of the summer breeze; then, in the midst of the songs of his sailors—songs so clear and sonorous, that they would have made a divine harmony had their notes been taken down—he saw the Island of Monte Cristo, no longer as a threatening rock in the midst of the waves, but as an oasis in the desert; then, as his boat drew nearer, the songs became louder, for an enchanting and mysterious harmony rose to heaven, as if some Loreley had decreed to attract a soul thither, or Amphion, the enchanter, intended there to build a city.

Alexandre Dumas

The Count of Monte Cristo

Prone upon the floor lay Mr. March, with his respectable legs in the air, and beside him, likewise prone, was Demi, trying to imitate the attitude with his own short, scarlet-stockinged legs, both grovellers so seriously absorbed that they were unconscious of spectators, till Mr. Bhaer laughed his sonorous laugh, and Jo cried out, with a scandalized face— “Father, father, here’s the Professor!” Down went the black legs and up came the gray head, as the preceptor said, with undisturbed dignity— “Good evening, Mr. Bhaer.

Louisa May Alcott

Little Women

There people publicly discussed the “question of fighting or of keeping quiet.” There were back shops where workingmen were made to swear that they would hasten into the street at the first cry of alarm, and “that they would fight without counting the number of the enemy.” This engagement once entered into, a man seated in the corner of the wine-shop “assumed a sonorous tone,” and said, “You understand!

Victor Hugo

Les Misérables

To me, away there in my bean-field at the other end of the town, the big guns sounded as if a puffball had burst; and when there was a military turnout of which I was ignorant, I have sometimes had a vague sense all the day of some sort of itching and disease in the horizon, as if some eruption would break out there soon, either scarlatina or canker-rash, until at length some more favorable puff of wind, making haste over the fields and up the Wayland road, brought me information of the “trainers.” It seemed by the distant hum as if somebody’s bees had swarmed, and that the neighbors, according to Virgil’s advice, by a faint tintinnabulum upon the most sonorous of their domestic utensils, were endeavoring to call them down into the hive again.

Henry David Thoreau

Walden

Not only was the line elegantly sonorous; it was also, I flattered myself, very aptly compendiously expressive.

Aldous Huxley

Crome Yellow

To be servile to none, to defer to none, not to any tyrant known or unknown, To walk with erect carriage, a step springy and elastic, To look with calm gaze or with a flashing eye, To speak with a full and sonorous voice out of a broad chest, To confront with your personality all the other personalities of the earth.

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

III If you had asked Babbitt what his religion was, he would have answered in sonorous Boosters’-Club rhetoric, “My religion is to serve my fellow men, to honor my brother as myself, and to do my bit to make life happier for one and all.” If you had pressed him for more detail, he would have announced, “I’m a member of the Presbyterian Church, and naturally, I accept its doctrines.” If you had been so brutal as to go on, he would have protested, “There’s no use discussing and arguing about religion; it just stirs up bad feeling.” Actually, the content of his theology was that there was a supreme being who had tried to make us perfect, but presumably had failed; that if one was a Good Man he would go to a place called Heaven (Babbitt unconsciously pictured it as rather like an excellent hotel with a private garden), but if one was a Bad Man, that is, if he murdered or committed burglary or used cocaine or had mistresses or sold nonexistent real estate, he would be punished.

Sinclair Lewis

Babbitt

His voice was a fine one, sonorous and sympathetic, and there was something genuine and simple in the very sound of it.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Brothers Karamazov

Fierce from his arm the enormous load he flings; Sonorous through the shaded air it sings; Couch'd to the earth, tempestuous as it flies, The crowd gaze upward while it cleaves the skies.

Homer

The Odyssey

Queen Daenerys shall be found.” A tall Ghiscari in a brocade robe spoke next, in a voice as sonorous as it was cold.

Martin, George, R. R.

A Dance With Dragons

The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips seemed to them deeper; their eyes that they could hardly see, larger; and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their souls sonorous, crystalline, and that reverberated in multiplied vibrations.

Gustave Flaubert

Madame Bovary

That proud honour claimed Azazel as his right, a Cherub tall: Who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurled The imperial ensign, which full high advanced, Shone like a meteor streaming to the wind, With gems and golden lustre rich emblazed, Seraphic arms and trophies; all the while Sonorous metal blowing martial sounds: At which the universal host up-sent A shout that tore Hell’s concave, and beyond Frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night.

John Milton

Paradise Lost

There is a natural gravity and a sonorous stateliness about Spanish, be it ever so colloquial, that make an absurdity doubly absurd, and give plausibility to the most preposterous statement.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

Don Quixote

Sometimes the chords were sonorous and melancholy.

Arthur Conan Doyle

A Study in Scarlet