A church bell has one job: to be heard by everybody, whether they want to hear it or not. In rural Victorian England, that made it a nickname.

A church-bell, in J. Redding Ware's Passing English of the Victorian Era (1909), is a talkative woman. Ware files it as rural slang, and gives it an example straight out of the mouth of a country husband, spelled the way he said it:

Ah ca'as ma wife choorch bell, cas 'er's yeard arl over t' village.

— I call my wife church-bell, because she's heard all over the village.

That one sentence is the whole word. A bell does not whisper, and it does not choose its audience. It rings, and the news goes out across the fields. A church-bell of a wife was someone whose voice — or whose news — carried the same way.

It is worth being plain about the slant. Ware records it only of women, and it belongs to a long run of English names for women who talk, most of them less kind than this one. Church-bell is milder than most of them: a joke about volume and reach rather than about character.

Ware gives no date for it beyond placing it in the countryside. Green's Dictionary of Slang, which records it as UK rural slang for a talkative woman, cites Ware alone, so his 1909 dictionary is the whole of the record.