warison

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The Word of the Day for October 29 is: 

warison   \WAIR-uh-sun\   noun
     : a bugle call to attack

Example sentence:
          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.” 





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