alarm

1. 1.

   fill with apprehension or alarm; cause to be unpleasantly surprised

   “I was horrified at the thought of being late for my interview”

   “The news of the executions horrified us”

   Synonymsdismayappalappallhorrify

   Broaderfrighten

   Narrowershock
2. 2.

   warn or arouse to a sense of danger or call to a state of preparedness

   “The empty house alarmed him”

   “We alerted the new neighbors to the high rate of burglaries”

   Synonymsalert

   Broaderwarn

   Narrowerwake

Other forms of alarm

plural

alarms·

past tense

alarmed·

present participle

alarming·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about alarm

What does alarm mean?

alarm means "fear resulting from the awareness of danger". That is the primary sense; the word has 6 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in alarm?

alarm has 2 syllables: a-larm. The stress falls on "larm". In IPA it is /əˈlɑɹm/.

What is another word for alarm?

Close synonyms include dismay, consternation, warning device, alarm system, alert. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is alarm a common word?

alarm is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.