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military

adjectivenouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈmɪlɪt(ə)ɹi//
  • United States//ˈmɪlɪtɛɹi//
  • United States//ˈmɪləˌtɛɹi//
  • Canada//ˈmɪlɪtɹi//
  • Canada//ˈmɪlɪˌtɛɹi//

Characteristic of members of the armed forces.

adjective

  1. 1

    Characteristic of members of the armed forces.

    She was dishonorably discharged from all military duties.

    At her invitation he outlined for her the succeeding chapters with terse military accuracy ; and what she liked best and best understood was avoidance of that false modesty which condescends, turning technicality into pabulum.

    Poirot was an extraordinary looking little man. He was hardly more than five feet, four inches, but carried himself with great dignity. His head was exactly the shape of an egg, and he always perched it a little on one side. His moustache was very stiff and military. The neatness of his attire was almost incredible.

  2. 2

    Relating to armed forces such as the army, marines, navy and air force (often as distinguished from civilians or police forces).

    If you join a military force, you may end up killing people.

  3. 3

    Relating to war.

    The only goal pursued by Western defense strategy — to cause the Warsaw Pact to break off an attack — is more military than political in nature.

  4. 4

    Relating to armies or ground forces.

Etymology

From Middle English militari, from Old French militaire, from Latin mīlitāris, from mīles (“soldier”) + -āris (whence -ary). Doublet of militaire.

noun

  1. 1

    Armed forces.

    He spent six years in the military.

    attempts by the military to influence government policy

    The dispatches […] also exposed the blatant discrepancy between the west's professed values and actual foreign policies. Having lectured the Arab world about democracy for years, its collusion in suppressing freedom was undeniable as protesters were met by weaponry and tear gas made in the west, employed by a military trained by westerners.

Forms

plural
militaries
comparative
more military
superlative
most military
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).