riadó

Riadó is a Hungarian noun meaning alarm, warning signal, or alert. It denotes both the condition of being on alert and the signal that triggers action in response to danger, imminent risk, or other urgent situations. In everyday use, riadó can refer to any formal warning or alarm in public safety contexts and to the signal that starts an organized response.

Riadó is used across civil defense, the military, emergency management, meteorology, and transportation to indicate that immediate precautions are required. A riadó can be a siren, a loudspeaker announcement, a public address system, or a digital alert sent via media networks, mobile devices, or the internet. The term is thus used for both the device that emits the warning and the event of issuing it.

Riadójel refers to the alarm signal itself; riadózás denotes the act of issuing or sounding the alarm. In journalistic and official writing, riadó is commonly used to describe alerts of various kinds, from civil-defense drills to weather warnings to security alerts.

See also: air raid siren, emergency alert systems, civil defense, weather warning.