cry havoc

1. Sound an alarm or warning, as in In his sermon the pastor cried havoc to the congregation's biases against gays. The noun havoc was once a command for invaders to begin looting and killing the defenders' town. Shakespeare so used it in Julius Caesar (3:1): “Cry 'Havoc' and let slip the dogs of war.” By the 19th century the phrase had acquired its present meaning.

Example Sentences

In Cry Havoc, the late British mercenary and coup plotter Simon Mann's 2011 memoir of his time incarcerated in Zimbabwe's Chikurubi Maximum Prison, the former British army officer said his "well-educated" fellow inmate Wicknell warned him never to criticise Zanu-PF.

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Cry havoc and let slip the Barbz of war.

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They must have known those they had abandoned would cry havoc.

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Dallas Children’s Theater served up a trio of Idris Goodwin plays about race, while the youth company Cry Havoc presented its climate change project, called “Endlings.”

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Michael Signer, then mayor of Charlottesville, worked mightily, as his book “Cry Havoc” makes clear, to try to avert the white supremacist standoff that took the life of Heather Heyer and tarnished the name of his town.

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