Alarmist

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /əˈlɑɹmɪst/

Definitions

1. A person who tends to create unwarranted concern or fear about dangers or problems
2. Someone who exaggerates risks or threats to cause anxiety in others
3. An individual who promotes alarm by overstating the seriousness of a situation

Etymology: Alarmist is a fairly modern formation: it is simply the English noun "alarm" with the suffix "-ist" added, meaning a person who practises or promotes something. The "-ist" ending itself has a long journey. It descends from the Ancient Greek "-istēs", used to form agent nouns from verbs, and passed into Latin as "-ista" and then through Old French "-iste" into Middle English, where it appeared in words such as "artist" and "novelist" long before "alarmist" existed. The base word "alarm" has a more dramatic past. It comes from Italian "all'arme", meaning "to arms", the cry that called soldiers to defend a town under attack. Its earliest English uses carried that military urgency, and the sense of a warning signal or a general state of fear developed from there. The result is a word for someone who turns a call to arms into a false emergency, which is a neat reversal of the battle cry from which its root came.

Synonyms: doomsayer, pessimist, prophet of doom, fearmonger, panic-monger

Antonyms: optimist, realist, sanguine