This is one of my favorite words for no better reason than the fact that I learned its provenance in my ‘History of the English Language’ class in college and thought they were, well, neat.
It comes from the Old English verb cwellan, ‘to kill’, and is the textbook example of words’ meanings being either strengthened or softened over time. Also, I think the word has a fitting sound, with the breathy open ‘kweh’ sound being capped down by the ‘l’. You may notice that’s a common theme in my favorite words!
With difficulty, Hortense quelled her rage and turned white-lipped away from her sarcastic professor.
Comments
quell trivia:
Pine, the old and venerable email app, has a number of configuration settings that begin with the term. They’re of the flavor – “Stop pine from doing this”.
Re: quell trivia:
Ha! I had forgotten that…it makes some sense, in the current usage of quell as ‘suppress’—you’re suppressing the natural behavior of the e-mail client.
I may be wrong to think that ‘suppression’ is a natural model for interaction with computer programs, but it fits both my hazy memory of programming and my current mindset, brought about by my bizarre desire to use an e-mail client in French; instead of ‘deleting’ messages, I ‘supprime’ them—which, in French, is ‘suppress’.