Noun: siren
| Singular | siren |
| Plural | sirens; sirenes |
Sample Sentences
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Now give ear to what I'm about to say to you, / and a god himself will bring it before your mind. / First, you will come to the Sirens. / These beings enthrall all men who arrive before them. […] [2008 October 7, Homer, The Odyssey, North Atlantic Books, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 278:]
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My attention was diverted from this sight by a furious yelling, like that of the thing called a siren in our manufacturing towns. [1898, H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds, London: William Heinemann, page 103:]
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1984, Steve Harris, "Aces High", Iron Maiden, Powerslave.
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There goes the siren that warns of the air raid / Then comes the sound of the guns sending flak / Out for the scramble we've got to get airborne / Got to get up for the coming attack.
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[2017, B.P. Abbott, “A gravitational-wave standard siren measurement of the Hubble constant”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name):]
Nouns inflected like siren
great go,
great-go,
senhor,
afrancesado,
sprite halo,
shacko,
commando,
villiaco,
magic Negro,
Phnom Laang bent-toed gecko,
chacmool,
yerbal,
depressor,
bombolo,
bolivar,
bolívar,
buccinator,
boratto,
botargo,
slashed zero, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
From Middle English siren, from Old French sereine and Latin Sīrēn, Sīrēna, from Ancient Greek Σειρήν (Seirḗn). 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. See: Latin Nouns '
Sīrēn'.