Other forms: sirens
A siren is the loud rising and falling wail that warns you something urgent is coming. An ambulance cutting through traffic, a police car pulling up behind you, the air-raid siren in old newsreels.
It is both the device on the roof and the sound it makes: you hear a siren, and someone switches the siren on. Factories have them for the end of a shift, and towns keep them for floods and storms. The other siren is a creature — in Greek myth the Sirens sang from the rocks and drew sailors onto them — which is why a siren is also a dangerously attractive woman. A siren song or a siren call is a tempting offer that will wreck you. Both meanings are one word, so an ambulance siren and a siren voice share nothing at all but their history.
1nounsirenA device that makes a loud warning sound, and the sound it makes.
“A siren went past the window and the dog started howling.”
synonyms: alarm
2noungreekIn Greek myth, a creature whose singing lured sailors to their deaths.
“Odysseus had himself tied to the mast so he could hear the sirens and survive them.”
3nounwomanA woman who is beautiful and dangerous to want.
“The film casts her as a siren in a red dress.”
The word begins with the Σειρῆνες of Greek myth, the singers whose voices sank ships, and reached English through Latin Sīrēn and Old French sereine. Naturalists then borrowed the name for real creatures: a French writer used it of a sea mammal in 1671, and Linnaeus gave it in 1766 to a genus of aquatic salamanders. The howling machine on an ambulance roof came last of all, and it too carries the singers' name.
Ancient Greek
Σειρήν
Latin
Sīrēn
Old French
sereine
Middle English
siren
English, today
siren
From Middle English siren, from Old French sereine and Latin Sīrēn, Sīrēna, from Ancient Greek Σειρήν. The mammalian sense was first attested in French in Dominique Bouhours, Les entretiens d'Ariste et d'Eugène, in 1671. The aquatic salamander sense was originally introduced by Linnaeus in 1766, for a genus of his reptiles.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA
Practised in Crime & Law, Sounds & Noises, Emergency & Rescue