BELLWETHER • FREE-TRANSLATOR.COM • Definition of Bellwether

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/bˈɛlwˌɛðər/ Listen

Bellwether

noun

Someone who assumes leadership of a movement or activity.

Sheep that leads the herd often wearing a bell.

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Etymology of 'Bellwether'

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"Bellwether" Quotes from Famous Books

... before the lead ram of a flock, compelling him to saltate, then removed, the thousandth ewe lamb will jump at that point just as did the pioneer. So it is with a pietistical and puristical people—they will follow some stupid old bellwether because utterly incapable of independent thought, of individual ratiocination. When "Les Miserables" first appeared some literary Columbus made the remarkable discovery that it was a French book, that it was shot full of "slang," the expressive patois of the race, that it was liberally ...

— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... consonant, and confound three vowels, (h i u,) and several diphthongs. Such was the vulgar pronunciation which the stern Gardiner maintained by penal statutes in the university of Cambridge: but the monosyllable bh represented to an Attic ear the bleating of sheep, and a bellwether is better evidence than a bishop or a chancellor. The treatises of those scholars, particularly Erasmus, who asserted a more classical pronunciation, are collected in the Sylloge of Havercamp, (2 vols. in octavo, Lugd. Bat. 1736, 1740:) but it is difficult ...

— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

Words linked to "Bellwether" : wether, leader