To scream in outrage. The simile is almost 2,500 years old, from the time of the Greek poet Aeschylus, who wrote, “He bellowed like a bull whose throat has just been cut.” Strictly speaking this cliché is a tautology, since to bellow means “to roar as a bull,” and has done so since the era of Middle English. Shakespeare wrote, “Jupiter became a bull and bellow’d” (The Winter’s Tale, 4.3).