war

Definition from Wiktionary, the free dictionary
Jump to navigation Jump to search
See also: War, WAR, wär, and war-

Translingual[edit]

Symbol[edit]

war

  1. (international standards) ISO 639-2 & ISO 639-3 language code for Waray.

English[edit]

English Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia
English Wikipedia has articles on:
Wikipedia Wikipedia
Part of the Stele of the Vultures depicting heavy infantry marching in formation
Part of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting Norman heavy cavalry charging Saxon shield wall
Mushroom cloud over Nagasaki
Painting of Napolean and his troops in winter retreating from Moscow
Wasteland after the attack on the German line at Flers-Coucelette
Naval warfare between the imperial Qing army and Taiping rebels
Clockwise from top left: The Stele of the Vultures showing the victory of Lagash over Umma (c. 2500 BC), the Bayeaux Tapestry showing the Battle of Hastings during the Norman Conquest of England (1066), the Retreat from Moscow during the Napoleonic Wars (1812), the Qing assault on Nanjing during the Taiping Rebellion (1864), the Battle of the Somme in WWI (1916), and the atomic bombing of Nagasaki in WWII (1945)
Washington Crossing the Delaware, Emanuel Leutze's 1851 depictions of the Battle of Trenton during the American Revolution
Vasily Vereshchagin's 1871 Apotheosis of War, part of a series depicting the Russian Empire's conquest of Central Asia
Guernica, Pablo Picasso's 1937 depiction of aerial bombing during the Spanish Civil War
"Bloody Saturday", Wang Xiaoting's photograph of a child orphaned during the 1937 aerial bombardment of Shanghai South Railway Station amid the Second Sino-Japanese War

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English werre, from Late Old English werre, wyrre (“armed conflict”) from Old Northern French werre (compare modern French guerre), from Medieval Latin werra, from Frankish *werru (“confusion; quarrel”), from Proto-Indo-European *wers- (“to mix up, confuse, beat, thresh”). Displaced native Old English ġewinn.

Related to Old High German werra (“confusion, strife, quarrel”) and German verwirren (“to confuse”), Old Saxon werran (“to confuse, perplex”), Dutch war (“confusion, disarray”), West Frisian war (“defense, self-defense, struggle", also "confusion”), Old English wyrsa, wiersa (“worse”), Old Norse verri (“worse, orig. confounded, mixed up”), Italian guerra (“war”). There may be a connection with worse and wurst.

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

war (countable and uncountable, plural wars)

  1. (uncountable) Organized, large-scale, armed conflict between countries or between national, ethnic, or other sizeable groups, usually but not always involving active engagement of military forces.
    holy war... just war... civil war...
    • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Exodus 1:10:
      Come on, let vs deale wisely with them, lest they multiply, and it come to passe that when there falleth out any warre, they ioyne also vnto our enemies, and fight against vs, and so get them vp out of the land.
    • 1611, The Holy Bible, […] (King James Version), London: […] Robert Barker, […], →OCLC, Mark 13:7:
      And when yee shall heare of warres, and rumors of warres, be yee not troubled: For such things must needs be, but the end shall not be yet.
    • 1854, Prince George, letter to his wife from Crimea:
      War is indeed a fearful thing and the more I see it the more dreadful it appears.
    • 1864 Sept. 12, William Tecumseh Sherman, letter to the mayor of Atlanta & al.:
      You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our Country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out... You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war.
    • 1879 June 19, William Tecumseh Sherman, speech to the Michigan Military Academy:
      I've been where you are now and I know just how you feel. It's entirely natural that there should beat in the breast of every one of you a hope and desire that some day you can use the skill you have acquired here. Suppress it! You don't know the horrible aspects of war. I've been through two wars and I know. I've seen cities and homes in ashes. I've seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. I tell you, war is hell!
    • 1907, Edward Porter Alexander, Military Memoirs of a Confederate, page 302:
      Here Lee and Longstreet stood during most of the fighting [at Fredericksburg], and it is told that, on one of the Federal repulses from Marye's Hill, Lee put his hand upon Longstreet's arm and said, "It is well that war is so terrible, or we would grow too fond of it."
    • 1922, Henry Ford; Samuel Crowther, chapter 17, in My Life and Work, Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing Company, Inc., →OCLC:
      Nobody can deny that war is a profitable business for those who like that kind of money. War is an orgy of money, just as it is an orgy of blood.
    • 1935, Smedley Butler, War Is a Racket, pages 1 & 7:
      War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives... Of course, it isn't put that crudely in war time. It is dressed into speeches about patriotism, love of country, and "we must all put our shoulders to the wheel," but the profits jump and leap and skyrocket—and are safely pocketed.
    • 1941, George Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, Pt. III:
      War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual.
    • 1944 June 27, Herbert Hoover, speech to the Republican National Convention:
      Older men declare war. But it is the youth that must fight and die.
    • 1949, George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, page 3:
      From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
      WAR IS PEACE
      FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
      IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
    • 1969, Norman Whitfield; Barrett Strong (lyrics), “War”, in War & Peace, performed by Edwin Starr:
      War, huh, Good God, y'all!
      What is it good for?
      Absolutely nothing...
    • 1997, Ron Perlman, Fallout:
      War. War never changes. The Romans waged war to gather slaves and wealth. Spain built an empire from its lust for gold and territory. Hitler shaped a battered Germany into an economic superpower. But war never changes.
    • 2013 July 20, "Old Soldiers?", The Economist, Vol. 408, No. 8845:
      Edward Wilson, the inventor of the field of sociobiology, once wrote that "war is embedded in our very nature". This is a belief commonly held not just by sociobiologists but also by anthropologists and other students of human behaviour. They base it not only on the propensity of modern man to go to war with his neighbours (and, indeed, with people halfway around the world, given the chance) but also on observations of the way those who still live a pre-agricultural "hunter-gatherer" life behave... Whether modern, industrial man is less or more warlike than his hunter-gatherer ancestors is impossible to determine... One thing that is true, though, is that murder rates have fallen over the centuries... Modern society may not have done anything about war. But peace is a lot more peaceful.
  2. (countable) A particular conflict of this kind.
    • 1865, Herman Melville, The Surrender at Appomattox:
      All human tribes glad token see
      In the close of the wars of Grant and Lee.
    • 1999 Nov. 8, Bill Clinton, speech at Georgetown University:
      A second challenge will be to implement, with our allies, a plan of stability in the Balkans, so that the region's bitter ethnic problems can no longer be exploited by dictators and Americans do not have to cross the Atlantic again to fight in another war.
    a war of succession... a war of attrition... the Cold War... World War III...
  3. (countable, sometimes proscribed) Protracted armed conflict against irregular forces, particularly groups considered terrorists.
    the Great Emu War... the Global War on Terrorism...
  4. (countable, by extension) Any protracted conflict, particularly
    1. (chiefly US) Campaigns against various social problems.
      • 1906, William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War":
        The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party... Ask all our millions, north and south, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our war for the Union expunged from history... and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, ar the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now to gain another similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition.
      the War on Poverty... the War on Drugs... the War on Christmas...
    2. (business) A protracted instance of fierce competition in trade.
      price wars... Cola Wars... format wars...
    3. (crime) A prolonged conflict between two groups of organized criminals, usually over organizational or territorial control.
      turf war... gang war... Castellammarese War...
    4. (Internet) An argument between two or more people with opposing opinions on a topic or issue.
      flame war... edit war...
  5. (obsolete, uncountable) An assembly of weapons; instruments of war.
  6. (obsolete) Armed forces.
  7. (uncountable, card games) Any of a family of card games where all cards are dealt at the beginning of play and players attempt to capture them all, typically involving no skill and only serving to kill time.
    • 2004, Karen Salyer McElmurray, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven:
      We played crazy eights, war, fifty-two card pickup. Rudy flipped the whole deck across the table at me and the cards sailed to the floor, kings, queens, deuces.

Antonyms[edit]

Hyponyms[edit]

Derived terms[edit]

Related terms[edit]

Translations[edit]

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.

See also[edit]

Verb[edit]

war (third-person singular simple present wars, present participle warring, simple past and past participle warred)

  1. (intransitive) To engage in conflict (may be followed by "with" to specify the foe).
  2. (transitive) To carry on, as a contest; to wage.

Synonyms[edit]

Translations[edit]

Anagrams[edit]

Ambonese Malay[edit]

Etymology[edit]

Unknown. Perhaps from Dutch vermogen or Portuguese saber.

Verb[edit]

war

  1. to be able to, can
    Beta war kami iskola dia pung ana sampe masu kaskola tinggi.
    I am able to send their children to our high school.

References[edit]

  • D. Takaria, C. Pieter (1998) Kamus Bahasa Melayu Ambon-Indonesia‎[1], Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa

Breton[edit]

Preposition[edit]

war

  1. on, over
    war ar sizhun ― during the week

Inflection[edit]

singular plural
1 warnon 1 warnomp
2 warnout 2 warnoc'h
3 m warnañ 3 warno
3 f warni

Derived terms[edit]

Chuukese[edit]

Verb[edit]

war

  1. to arrive

Dusner[edit]

Noun[edit]

war

  1. (fresh) water

References[edit]

  • D. C. Kamholz, Austronesians in Papua (2014, Berkeley)

Dutch[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle Dutch werre, warre (“confusion, disarray, conflict”), from Old Dutch *werra, from Proto-West Germanic *werru (“confusion; quarrel”).

Pronunciation[edit]

Noun[edit]

war f (plural warren, diminutive warretje n)

  1. confusion, disarray
    • 2016 March 15, Josien Wolthuizen; Hanneloes Pen, “Man doodgestoken in fietsenwinkel Nieuw-West”, in Het Parool:
      Volgens een bovenbuurvrouw kwamen hulpdiensten rond 12 uur 's middags naar de fietsenwinkel. "Ik had geen idee wat er aan de hand was. Maar de zoon van de eigenaar kwam eraan en was helemaal in de war. (...)"
      (please add an English translation of this quote)
  2. tangle, mess
    • 2016 January 29, “Wist je dat papierklemmen je leven veel gemakkelijker kunnen maken?”, in Het Laatste Nieuws:
      Van statief voor je smartphone tot instrument om oortjes uit de war te houden, tot zelfs een portefeuille. De mogelijkheden met papierklemmen zijn eindeloos, maar de Japanner Venlee geeft je alvast 15 lifehacks.
      (please add an English translation of this quote)
  3. an elevated area on the floor of a body of water, a kind of contraption for luring and catching fish, where nets and fykes could be installed
    • 1949, G. Karsten. ‘Eenvorme, Informe, Yefforme’, De Speelwagen 10, no. 4: 307.
      Welnu, deze stoepen of warren bevonden zich aan de walkant en niet midden in het water.
    • 1667, Handtvesten, privilegien, willekeuren ende ordonnantien der Stadt Enchuysen, page 345:
      De Schutters van de respective Steden, werden geauctoriseert, alle de Fuycken, buyten de benoemde Warren in de Wateringh staende, te mogen visiteren, of de selve keur mogen houden ofte niet, (...)
      (please add an English translation of this quote)

Quotations[edit]

This entry needs quotations to illustrate usage. If you come across any interesting, durably archived quotes then please add them!

Derived terms[edit]

Related terms[edit]

Dutch Low Saxon[edit]

A user suggests that this Dutch Low Saxon entry be cleaned up, giving the reason: “Low Prussian isn't a form of Dutch Low Saxon”.
Please see the discussion on Requests for cleanup(+) or the talk page for more information and remove this template after the problem has been dealt with.

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Low German wahr, from Middle Low German wâr, from Old Saxon wār. Cognate to German wahr.

Adjective[edit]

war

  1. (in some dialects) true

Elfdalian[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Old Norse hvar, from Proto-Germanic *hwar. Cognate with Swedish var.

Adverb[edit]

war

  1. where, in what place

German[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

Verb[edit]

war

  1. first-person singular preterite of sein

Luxembourgish[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Pronunciation[edit]

  • IPA(key): /vaːr/, [vaː], [vaːʀ]

Verb[edit]

war

  1. first-person singular preterite indicative of sinn
  2. third-person singular preterite indicative of sinn

Mpur[edit]

Noun[edit]

war

  1. water

References[edit]

  • A Sketch of Mpur, in Languages of the Eastern Bird's Head (2002)

Northern Kurdish[edit]

Etymology 1[edit]

Noun[edit]

war m

  1. place
  2. camp, camping ground

Etymology 2[edit]

Noun[edit]

war m

  1. respect, regard

Old High German[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Proto-West Germanic *wār, from Proto-Germanic *wēraz, whence also Old English wǣr, Old Norse værr.

Adjective[edit]

wār

  1. true

Derived terms[edit]

Descendants[edit]

  • Middle High German: wār

Old Saxon[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Proto-West Germanic *wār, from Proto-Germanic *wēraz, from Proto-Indo-European *weh₁ros.

Adjective[edit]

wār

  1. true

Declension[edit]

Positive forms of wār
Strong declension
gender masculine feminine neuter
case singular plural singular plural singular plural
nominative wār wāre, wāra wār wāra wār wār, wāra
accusative wāran, wāren wāra, wāre wāra wāra wār wār, wāra
genitive wāres, wāras wāraro, wāroro, wārero wārara, wāraro wāraro, wāroro, wārero wāres, wāras wāraro, wāroro, wārero
dative wārumu, wārum, wārun, wārun, wāron, wāren, wāran wārun, wāron, wārum wāraro, wāraru, wārara wārun, wāron wārumu, wārum, wārun, wārun, wāron, wāren, wāran wārun, wāron, wārum
Weak declension
gender masculine feminine neuter
case singular plural singular plural singular plural
nominative wāro, wāra wāron, wārun wāra, wāre wāron, wārun, wāran wāra, wāre wāron, wārun
accusative wāron, wāran wāron, wārun wārun, wāron, wāran wāron, wārun, wāran wāra, wāre wāron, wārun
genitive wāren, wāran wārono, wāreno wārun, wāran, wāren wārono wāren, wāran wārono, wāreno
dative wāron, wāren, wāran wāron, wārun wārun, wāran wāron, wārun wāron, wāren, wāran wāron, wārun


Polish[edit]

Polish Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia pl

Pronunciation[edit]

  • IPA(key): /var/
  • Rhymes: -ar
  • Syllabification: war

Etymology 1[edit]

Inherited from Old Polish war, from Proto-Slavic *varъ.

Noun[edit]

war m inan

  1. (obsolete) boiling water or other liquid
  2. (obsolete) extreme heat
Declension[edit]
Declension of war
singular
nominative war
genitive waru
dative warowi
accusative war
instrumental warem
locative warze
vocative warze
Related terms[edit]
verb

Etymology 2[edit]

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Noun[edit]

war m inan

  1. var, volt-ampere reactive (unit of electrical power)
Declension[edit]
Declension of war
singular plural
nominative war wary
genitive waru warów
dative warowi warom
accusative war wary
instrumental warem warami
locative warze warach
vocative warze wary

Further reading[edit]

  • war in Wielki słownik języka polskiego, Instytut Języka Polskiego PAN
  • war in Polish dictionaries at PWN

Scots[edit]

Etymology 1[edit]

From Middle English were, weren, from Old English wǣre, wǣron, wǣren, from Proto-Germanic *wēz-, from Proto-Indo-European *h₂wes-.

Verb[edit]

war

  1. first/second/third-person plural simple past indicative of be; were

Etymology 2[edit]

From Middle English werre, from Old Northern French, ultimately a Frankish loan.

Noun[edit]

war (plural wars)

  1. war
Alternative forms[edit]

References[edit]

Somali[edit]

Noun[edit]

war ?

  1. news
    Wax war miyaa hey-sa? ― Do you have some news?

Tocharian B[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Proto-Tocharian *wär (whence Tocharian A wär), from Proto-Indo-European *wódr̥ (“water”) through a regular (endocentric) thematicization via *udrom.

Noun[edit]

war ?

  1. water

See also[edit]

  • āp (“body of water, river, flood”)

Yola[edit]

Alternative forms[edit]

Etymology[edit]

From Middle English were, from Old English wǣre.

Verb[edit]

war

  1. were
    • 1867, GLOSSARY OF THE DIALECT OF FORTH AND BARGY:
      A war cowdealeen wi ooree.
      They were scolding with one another.

Related terms[edit]

References[edit]

  • Jacob Poole (1867), William Barnes, editor, A Glossary, With some Pieces of Verse, of the old Dialect of the English Colony in the Baronies of Forth and Bargy, County of Wexford, Ireland, London: J. Russell Smith, page 32
Retrieved from "https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=war&oldid=73214393"