The story
- Old Northern French · derived fromwarison
- Middle English · derived fromwarisoun“reward, punishment”
- Middle Scots · borrowed fromwarisoun
- English todaywarison
Borrowed from Middle Scots warisoun, from Middle English warisoun (“reward, punishment”), from Old Northern French warison, variant garison, guarison. Doublet of garrison. The change in sense from "reward" to "bugle call" arose from Walter Scott's apparent misinterpretation of a line in the Middle English text The Battle of Otterburn, equivalent to modern English "Minstrels, play up for your warison".
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.