warison

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for October 29, 2007 is: warison • \WAIR-uh-sun\ • noun : a bugle call to attack Examples: The soldiers stood alert at their posts, as per their commander's orders, listening for the warison that would instruct them to advance into enemy territory. Did you know? When Sir Walter Scott first encountered the word "warison" around the beginning of the 19th century, it was a rare word that had been around for six centuries, occasionally used to mean either "wealth or possessions" or "reward." In his 1805 poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Scott used the word to refer to a bugle call ordering soldiers to attack, probably because he misinterpreted what the word meant when he read it in "The Battle of Otterbourne," a ballad found in Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. The original word (which Scott encountered as Middle English "waryson") derives from the Anglo-French "garisun," which means "healing, protection" and is also the source of the English word "garrison," meaning "a military post." See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.