tocsin

Borrowed from Middle French, from Old French toquesain (modern tocsin), from Old Occitan tocasenh, from tocar (“strike, touch”) + senh (“bell”).

• IPA^(key): /ˈtɒksɪn/
• Rhymes: -ɒksɪn
• Homophone: toxin

tocsin (plural tocsins)

1. An alarm or other signal sounded by a bell or bells, originally especially with reference to France.
   • 1804, The Times, 23 Aug 1804, p.3 col. C

     At half-past one, on the sounding of the tocsin (or bell of the public-house) about fifteen persons were collected, when the Rev. J. Bromley was called to the chair.

   • 1895–1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, published 1898, OCLC 699873, book I (The Coming of the Martians), page 131:

     The noise of drumming and trumpeting came from the Albany Street Barracks, and every church within earshot was hard at work killing sleep with a vehement disorderly tocsin.

   • 1970, JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition:

     As she entered the projection theatre the soundtrack reverberated across the sculpture garden, a melancholy tocsin modulated by Talbert’s less and less coherent commentary.

   • 1992, Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, Harper Perennial 2007, p. 281:

     I'll ring the tocsin, I'll have Saint-Antoine out. I can put twenty thousand armed men on the streets, just like that.

   • 2022, Gary Gerstle, chapter 3, in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order […] , New York: Oxford University Press, →ISBN, Part II. The Neoliberal Order, 1970–2020:

     Allen Ginsberg had sounded the tocsin for rescuing humanity from the deadening hand of modernity, which he saw in terms of capitalism, materialism, and monotony, each contributing to the crushing of the human spirit.

2. A bell used to sound an alarm.

• Tocsin in the Encyclopædia Britannica (11th edition, 1911)

• Costin, sintoc, tonics

From Old French toquesain, borrowed from Old Occitan tocasenh, from tocar (“strike, touch”) + senh (“bell”).

• IPA^(key): /tɔk.sɛ̃/

• Audio

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tocsin m (plural tocsins)

1. an alarm, a tocsin

• “tocsin”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

• citons, tonics

From French tocsin.

tocsin n (plural tocsine)

1. tocsin