The cracking and booming of the ice indicate a change of temperature.

It was balanced perilously between a small town that lacked only a sheriff, and a booming frontier town.

At eight o'clock the booming of cannon was added to the sound of musketry.

The old fable of this bird inserting its beak into a reed or plunging it into the ground, and so causing the booming sound with which its name will be always associated, is also exploded, and nowadays indeed so few people in Britain have ever heard its loud and awful voice, which seems to be uttered only in the breeding-season, and is therefore unknown in a country where it no longer breeds, that incredulity as to its booming at all has in some quarters succeeded the old belief in this as in other reputed peculiarites of the species.

During the breeding season it utters a booming noise, from which it probably derives its generic name, Botaurus, and which has made it in many places an object of superstitious dread.