fire drill

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fire drill (plural fire drills)

2. An organized practice to prepare occupants of an office, school or other public building for evacuation in the event of a fire.

   Synonym: fire practice

   Hypernyms: drill, exercise, practice < activity

   There was a fire drill this morning. We had to leave the building calmly and go to the birch tree, our meeting point.

4. (idiomatic, US) Any pointless, unproductive, useless, or chaotic activity.

   Synonyms: Chinese fire drill, Polish fire drill (both ethnically bigoted)

   Coordinate term: Mexican standoff

   Since they've changed the standards again, our previous efforts now just amount to a fire drill.

6. A fire-starting tool consisting of a wooden rod and some primitive means of rapidly rotating the rod on a flat surface like a drill until tinder can be ignited.

   Synonyms: bow drill, firestick, hand drill, pump drill

   Near-synonym: firestarter (synonymous in some versions)

   • 1999, Paul Douglas Campbell, Survival Skills of Native California, →ISBN, page 4:

     There is no machine on earth so potent, yet so simple and elegant, as the two sticks of the Native American fire drill;

• “fire-drill”, in Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire: Cambridge University Press, 1999–present.
• “fire-drill”, in Collins English Dictionary, 2011–present.
• “fire drill”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.