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warfare

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈwɔːfɛə//
  • United States//ˈwɔɹfɛɹ//

The waging of war or armed conflict against an enemy.

noun

  1. 1

    The waging of war or armed conflict against an enemy.

    The Philistines gathered their armies together for warfare, to fight with Israel.

  2. 2

    Military operations of some particular kind e.g. guerrilla warfare.

Etymology

From war + fare; perhaps a shortening of Middle English werre-faringe, werfarynge (“waging war, warfare”, literally “going to war”).

verb

  1. 1

    To lead a military life; to carry on continual wars.

Forms

plural
warfares
past tense
warfared
past participle
warfared
present participle
warfaring
third person singular
warfares
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).