• enPR: dĭn, IPA: /dɪn/

din

1. A loud noise; a cacophony or loud commotion.
   • circa 1593 William Shakespeare, The Taming of the Shrew, Act I, Scene 2,

     Think you a little din can daunt mine ears?

   • 1808 February 21, Walter Scott, “Canto Fifth. The Court.”, in Marmion; a Tale of Flodden Field, Edinburgh: Printed by J[ames] Ballantyne and Co. for Archibald Constable and Company, […]; London: William Miller, and John Murray, OCLC 270129616 ↗, stanza IV, page 245 ↗:

     [B]red to war, / He knew the battle’s din afar, / And joyed to hear it swell.

   • 1850, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H., London: Edward Moxon, Canto 87, p. 129,

     How often, hither wandering down,

     My Arthur found your shadows fair,

     And shook to all the liberal air

     The dust and din and steam of town:

   • 1998, Ian McEwan, Amsterdam (novel), New York: Anchor, 1999, Part 1, Chapter 1, pp. 9-10,

     So many faces Clive had never seen by daylight, and looking terrible, like cadavers jerked upright to welcome the newly dead. Invigorated by this jolt of misanthropy, he moved sleekly through the din, ignored his name when it was called, withdrew his elbow when it was plucked [...]

   • 2014, Daniel Taylor, “England and Wayne Rooney see off Scotland in their own back yard,” The Guardian, 18 November 2014,

     England certainly made a mockery of the claim that they might somehow be intimidated by the Glasgow din. Celtic Park was a loud, seething pit of bias.

• French: vacarme, boucan (colloquial)
• German: Lärm
• Italian: baccano, frastuono, schiamazzo, strepitio
• Portuguese: estrépido, algazarra, clamor
• Russian: гул
• Spanish: estruendo

din (dins, present participle dinning; past and past participle dinned)

1. (intransitive) To make a din, to resound.
   • 1820, William Wordsworth, “The Waggoner” Canto 2, in The Miscellaneous Poems of William Wordsworth, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, Volume 2, p. 21,

     For, spite of rumbling of the wheels,

     A welcome greeting he can hear;—

     It is a fiddle in its glee

     Dinning from the CHERRY TREE!

   • 1920, Zane Grey, “The Rube’s Pennant” in The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, p. 68,

     My confused senses received a dull roar of pounding feet and dinning voices as the herald of victory.

   • 1924, Edith Wharton, Old New York (novellas): New Year’s Day (The ’Seventies), New York: D. Appleton & Co., Chapter 4, pp. 62-63,

     Should she speak of having been at the fire herself—or should she not? The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear what her companion was saying […]

2. (intransitive) (of a place) To be filled with sound, to resound.
   • 1914, Rex Beach, The Auction Block, New York: Harper & Bros., Chapter 3, p. 33,

     The room was dinning with the strains of an invisible orchestra and the vocal uproar […]

3. (transitive) To assail (a person, the ears) with loud noise.
   • 1716, Joseph Addison, The Free-Holder: or Political Essays, London: D. Midwinter & J. Tonson, No. 8, 16 January, 1716, pp. 45-46,

     She ought in such Cases to exert the Authority of the Curtain Lecture; and if she finds him of a rebellious Disposition, to tame him, as they do Birds of Prey, by dinning him in the Ears all Night long.

   • 1817, John Keats, “On the Sea” in Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton (editor), Life, Letters, and Literary Remains, of John Keats, London: Edward Moxon, 1848, Volume 2, p. 291,

     Oh ye! whose ears are dinn’d with uproar rude,

     Or fed too much with cloying melody,—

     Sit ye near some old cavern’s mouth, and brood

     Until ye start, as if the sea-nymphs quired!

   • 1938, Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (novel), New York: Vintage, 2002, Chapter 1,

     No alarm-clock dinned her to get up but the morning light woke her, pouring through the uncurtained glass.

4. (transitive) To repeat continuously, as though to the point of deafening or exhausting somebody.
   • 1724, Jonathan Swift The Hibernian Patriot: Being a Collection of the Drapier’s Letters to the People of Ireland concerning Mr. Wood’s Brass Half-Pence, London, 1730, Letter 2, p. 61,

     This has been often dinned in my Ears.

   • 1866, Elizabeth Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, Chapter 50,

     “Mamma, do you forget that I have promised to marry Roger Hamley?” said Cynthia quietly.

     “No! of course I don’t—how can I, with Molly always dinning the word ‘engagement’ into my ears? […] ”

   • 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Part One, Chapter 6,

     By careful early conditioning, by games and cold water, by the rubbish that was dinned into them at school and in the Spies and the Youth League, by lectures, parades, songs, slogans, and martial music, the natural feeling had been driven out of them.

   • 2004, Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason, Penguin, page 183,

     His mother had dinned The Whole Duty of Man into him in early childhood.

• (repeat continuously) drum.

1. Surname