[Gr. Στέντωρ, Hom., Il., V. 785.]
1. The name of a Greek warrior in the Trojan war, ‘whose voice was as powerful as fifty voices of other men’; applied allusively to a man of powerful voice.
1600. Nashe, Summer’s Last Will, F 3 b. Those mountaines are the houses of great Lords, Where Stentor with his hundreth voices sounds A hundreth trumpes at once with rumor fild.
1609. B. Jonson, Sil. Wom., IV. ii. Rogues, Hell-bounds, Stentors, out of my doores, you sonnes of noyse and tumult.
c. 1611. Chapman, Iliad, To Rdr. Brutish noises … Are bellow’d-out, and cracke the barbarous voices Of Turkish Stentors.
1748. Smollett, Rod. Rand., v. [He] bawled out, ‘Murder! thieves!’ with the voice of a Stentor.
1840. Dickens, Old C. Shop, i. Laughing like a stentor, Kit gradually backed to the door, and roared himself out.
1870. R. B. Brough, Marston Lynch, x. 90. She roared the … words through her hands with the lungs of a stentor.
ǁ 2. [mod.L.] A genus of Protozoa; an individual of this genus, a trumpet-shaped protozoan.
1863. Wood, Illustr. Nat. Hist., III. 766. The second figure represents the Stentor, so called because its general shape bears some resemblance to that of a speaking-trumpet.
1875. Hardwicke’s Sci.-Gossip, XI. 160/2. I found it to consist of an immense assemblage of stentors, apparently Stentor polymorpha, imbedded in a mass of dirty-looking jelly.
3. A platyrrhine monkey of the South American genus Mycetes.
1891. Century Dict.
4. attrib. with the meaning ‘stentorian.’
1837. Carlyle, Fr. Rev., I. III. iii. Where Mirabeau is now, with stentor-lungs, ‘denouncing Agio.’ Ibid., III. I. iv. ‘Legislators!’ so speaks the stentor-voice.
