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summons

nounverbnounverbattested in dialogue

  • //ˈsʌ.mənz//

A call to do something, especially to come.

noun

  1. 1

    A call to do something, especially to come.

    He sent to summon the seditious, and to offer pardon[…]; but neither summons nor pardon was any thing regarded.

    this summons […] unfit either to dispute or disobey

    special summonses by the king

    It was more than a week after his introduction to Carrados that Lieutenant Hollyer had a summons to present himself at The Turrets again. He found Mr Carlyle already there and the two friends awaiting his arrival.

  2. 2

    A notice summoning someone to appear in court, as a defendant, juror or witness.

    Four summonses were brought recently on behalf of St. Pancras Borough Council against the British Transport Commission in respect of the emission of smoke by locomotives standing at Camden Motive Power Depot. (The summonses were dismissed)

  3. 3

    A demand for surrender.

Etymology

From Middle English somouns (“order or command to do something”), borrowed from Old French sumunce (modern French semonce), from Vulgar Latin *summonsa, a noun use of the feminine past participle of summoneō, summonēre (“to summon”).

verb

  1. 1

    To serve someone with a summons.

    It proposes that those held in the prototype Selfridges cells be kept for a maximum of four hours to have their identity confirmed and be charged, summonsed or given a fine.

noun

  1. 1

    Also a form of summonplural of summon

Etymology

See the etymology of the corresponding lemma form.

verb

  1. 1

    Also a form of summonthird-person singular simple present indicative of summon

Forms

plural
summonses
past tense
summonsed
past participle
summonsed
present participle
summonsing
third person singular
summonses
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).