- Ech|o
-
–n.1. a sounding again; a repeating of a sound; sound heard after it is reflected from some object. You hear an echo if you shout and the sound is sent back by a cliff or hill or the walls of a large, empty room and heard again as it from a distance. »
Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying (Tennyson).
SYNONYM(S): reverberation.2. Figurative. a person who repeats the words or imitates the feelings, acts, ideas, or style of another: »Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo (Emerson).
3. Figurative. a repeating the words or imitating the feelings, acts, ideas, or style of another: »His folly and his wisdom…are all of his own growth, not the echo…of other men (Jonathan Swift).
4. Figurative. a sympathetic response: »Patriotic sentiments evoke an echo in every breast.
5. a radio or sound wave which has been reflected. The detection of radio or sound wave reflections is the basis of radar and sonar: »…the familiar processes of radar to explore space around us by sending out powerful signals and looking carefully at the echoes when they come back (A. J. Higgs).
6. Music. a) a very soft repetition of a phrase. b) a stop of an organ for producing soft or echolike tones.7. a cardplayer's response to a signal from his partner or by a signal to his partner's lead.–v.i.1. to be heard again; sound again; be repeated in sound: »The gunshot echoed through the valley. Larks and nightingales make the sky echo with sound (William Butler Yeats).
2. Figurative. to repeat or imitate the words, feelings, acts, ideas, or style of another: »I would repeat a stanza and he would softly echo.
3. to give out a loud sound: »Drums and trumpets echo loudly (Longfellow).
–v.t.1. to sound again; repeat in sound: »The mountains echoed the yodeler's call.
2. Figurative. to say or do always what another says or does: »That girl is always echoing what her mother says.
╂[< Latin ēchō < Greek ēch
]–ech´o|er, noun.Ech|o «EHK oh», noun.1. Greek Legend. a nymph who pined away with love for Narcissus until only her voice was left.2. echo personified.3. U.S. a code name for the letter e, used in transmitting radio messages.
Useful english dictionary. 2012.
