In my book, I came across this sentence:
"The revolution of 1848 reverberated throughout Europe, resulting in a
series of revolutions, most powerfully in…"
Because the subject is the history of 19th century in Europe, many revolutions and ideologies was born and affected other countries beside the country they were born in.When I read it, the book uses different verbs to explain to this spreading of ideas. For example ; to echo, to resonate, to spread, to resound and last but not least to reverberate.
I'd like to know only for this sense in the context of the sentence, what would be change if we replaced to reverberate with other verbs in the original sentence in terms of meaning its convey. Did the writer just try to use different words or there are subtle difference in terms of effect .
"The revolution of 1848 resonated throughout Europe, resulting in a series of revolutions, most powerfully in…"
"The revolution of 1848 echoed throughout Europe, resulting in a series of revolutions, most powerfully in…"
"The revolution of 1848 spread throughout Europe, resulting in a series of revolutions, most powerfully in…"
"The revolution of 1848 resounded throughout Europe, resulting in a series of revolutions, most powerfully in…"
Best Answer
As someone who has studied the 1848 revolutions in the last ten years I can well understand why the author choose reverberate. There were three principal centres of revolution - Berlin, Vienna and Paris- with a lot of other places becoming involved.
Each fed off the other and the revolutionaries in each place gave encouragement to one another. So reverberate, which implies an echo sound, seems precisely the right word to have used.
My dictionary defines resound with reference to reverberate anyway.
Better than spread, reverberate gives the sense that the sound (the revolutionary ardour) resonated back and forth. Which is what I seem to recall happened.