canorous /cə-NOR-us/. adjective. Musical, melodious, richly resonant, tuneful. From canor (melody), from canere (to sing). From PIE root kan– (to sing) from which are derived accent, canto, chant and incentive. See also: euphonious, harmonious.
“The groom was in the utmost alarm, both on his own account and on mine: but, in spite of this, so irresistibly had the sense of the ludicrous, in this unhappy contretems, taken possession of his fancy, that he sang out a long, loud, and canorous peal of laughter, that might have wakened the Seven Sleepers.” (Thomas De Quincey)
“Motions of waking trouble winter air,
I wonder, and his face as it were forms
Solemn, canorous, under the howled alarms,—
The eyes shadowed and shut.”
(John Berryman)
“But birds that are canorous, and whose notes we most commend, are of little throats and short necks, as Nightingales, Finches, Linnets, Canary birds and Larks.” (Thomas Browne)
“Though canorous spells from the musical bells
Of the city’s fifty towers
Shouted the news of his lunatic cruise
In the early morning hours…”
(J. R. R. Tolkien)
“Silence had raised a startled head and poised there, listening. Then, with crack of pick and boom of blast, man had hurled her back. Further and further had he driven her. With his advancing horde, mad in their lust for the loot of the valley, he had banished her.” (Robert W. Service)
“the gnats are a very plague of Egypt, and suspicious, with good reason, of an erysipelatous tendency, I am anxious concerning the effects of the irritation produced by these canorous visitants.” (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
“Reading his description of St Hugh, ‘the sweet and inerrable canorous voice of the dead’, one has to believe in the genuineness of his nostalgia – for the Catholic Church, for innocence.” (Graham Greene)
“Here is a great deal of talk about rhythm—and naturally; for in our canorous language rhythm is always at the door. But it must not be forgotten that in some languages this element is almost, if not quite, extinct, and that in our own it is probably decaying.” (Robert Louis Stevenson)
“The dull life at Oxford was varied by the occasional visit of a mesmeric lecturer; and one youth caused peals of canorous laughter by walking round in a pretended mesmeric sleep and kissing the pretty daughters of the dons.” (Thomas Wright)