Word of the Day Archive
Tuesday November 5, 2002
clarion \KLAIR-ee-uhn\ , noun:
1. A kind of trumpet having a clear and shrill note.
2. The sound of this instrument or a sound similar to it.
adjective:
1. Sounding like the clarion; loud and clear.
His voice and laugh, which perpetually re-echoed through the Custom-House, had nothing of the tremulous quaver and cackle of an old man's utterance; they came strutting out of his lungs, like the crow of a cock, or the blast of a clarion.
-- Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Their voices were different; my grandfather's was high and clarion, Freddie's bass was rough, my father's baritone was mellow and expressive, but they blended so naturally that together they sounded like one being.
-- Deborah Weisgall, A Joyful Noise
We have it in our power to begin the world over again, wrote Thomas Paine in Common Sense (1776), his clarion call for American independence.
-- Robert Famighetti, "et al. (Editor(s))", The World Almanac and Book of Facts 1999
Others will decide that the disaster is a clarion call to spend more time with their families or finally pursue some personal goal.
-- Susan Chandler, "Shaken consumers come back", Chicago Tribune, September 16, 2001
Clarion comes from Medieval Latin clario, clarion-, from Latin clarus, "clear."
Dictionary.com Entry and Pronunciation for clarion
