From a Voice That Lured Sailors to a Sound That Warns Them
A siren is a warning device with a loud rising sound. It is named after the mythical creatures whose singing lured sailors onto rocks.
A siren is a device that makes a loud rising and falling sound to warn people. The name is an inversion of the myth: in Homer the Sirens sang so beautifully that sailors steered onto the rocks, so Odysseus had himself lashed to the mast. The modern siren uses sound to keep people away from danger rather than draw them into it. The physicist Charles Cagniard de la Tour named his 1819 instrument after them.
- A warning device. *An air-raid siren.*
- A mythical creature. *The Sirens of the Odyssey.*
- A dangerously attractive woman (dated). *A siren of the silent screen.*
- Siren call — a tempting but ruinous invitation. *The siren call of easy credit.*
Word forms
| Form | Word | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Noun | siren | A distant siren. |
| Plural | sirens | Sirens wailed. |
| Compound | siren call | A siren call. |
| Compound | siren song | The siren song of fame. |
| Greek | Seiren | Σειρήν |
- The siren went off just before midnight.The device.
- He resisted the siren song of early retirement.Figurative.
- Sirens appear in Book Twelve of the Odyssey.The myth.
Were sirens mermaids?
- In Greek myth — part woman, part bird, not fish
- In later European art — increasingly shown as fish-tailed
- In French and Spanish — *sirène* and *sirena* now mean mermaid
- In English — siren kept the bird-woman origin but the image blurred
- The lure — the voice, not the appearance, is the danger in Homer
Greek *Seiren*, through Latin and Old French. The acoustic instrument was named in 1819, and the warning device sense followed in the nineteenth century.
Were sirens mermaids?
Not originally. Greek sirens were part bird. The fish-tailed image came later and is now standard in several European languages.
Why is a warning device named after them?
Because of the sound. The physicist who built the first siren instrument in 1819 named it for the mythical singers.