tocsin – English noun declension

Noun: tocsin

Singular	tocsin
Plural	tocsins

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. [1804 August 23, The Times, p.3 col. C:]
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. [1895–1897, H[erbert] G[eorge] Wells, “In London”, in The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, published 1898, →OCLC, book I (The Coming of the Martians), page 131:]
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. [1970, JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition:]
I'll ring the tocsin, I'll have Saint-Antoine out. I can put twenty thousand armed men on the streets, just like that. [1992, Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, Harper Perennial, published 2007, page 281:]
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. [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:]

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

Portuguese Nouns sino.

English noun forms of tocsin