alarum

noun

1. A danger signal or warning.

   “These are the only visible luxuries: the rest is the irreducible minimum of poverty's needs: a wretched bed heaped with all sorts of coverings that have any warmth in them, a draped packing case with a basin and jug on it and a little looking glass over it, a chair and table, the refuse of some suburban kitchen, and an American alarum clock on the shelf above the unused fireplace: the whole lighted with a gas lamp with a penny in the slot meter.”

   “The story struck the depressingly familiar note with which true stories ring in the tried ears of experienced policemen.[…]The second note, the high alarum, not so familiar and always important since it indicates the paramount sin in Man's private calendar, took most of them by surprise although they had been well prepared.”

   “Just another forum, then, sounding the usual alarums on the looming threat from global warming?”

2. A call to arms.

   “Come let vs meet them at the mountain foot, / And with a ſodaine and an hot alarum / Driue all their horſes headlong down the hill.”

   “It seems to me that by the same process they are also made less "real" - distinguished, in part, by the physical size of the television screen, which, for all the industry's advances, still shows one a picture of men three inches tall shooting at other men three inches tall, and trivialized, or at least tamed, by the enveloping cozy alarums of the household.”

   “On the cable news channels, especially, there were teary-eyed interviews with bystanders; alarums from both the gun control advocates on the one side and the Second Amendment nuts on the other; and—inevitably, inappropriately—debates over what the shooting might mean for this closely-watched Senate race.”

3. (archaic)An alarm clock.

   “Ten minutes passed by the measure of the battered old alarum on the dresser shelf before the young man returned.”

verb

1. (archaic)To sound alarums, to sound an alarm.

   “Now o're the one halfe World / Nature ſeemes dead, and wicked Dreames abuſe / The Curtain'd ſleepe: Witchcraft celebrates / Pale Heccats Offrings: and wither'd Murther, / Alarum'd by his Centinell, the Wolfe, / Whoſe howle's his Watch, thus with his ſtealthy pace, / With Tarquins rauiſhing ſides, towards his deſigne / Moues like a Ghoſt.”