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belligerence

nounC2Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #14,950 of 15,258neutral

Belligerence is aggressive readiness to fight. Answer with belligerence.

It describes a manner rather than any actual fighting. Belligerence in a negotiation usually signals weakness rather than strength.

Definitions of belligerence

  1. 1nounbelligerenceAggressive readiness to fight.C2

    “The belligerence of the reply ended the correspondence.”

belligerence is a manner.

Where it comes from

Belligerent plus -ence, from Latin bellum, war, plus gerere, to wage.

  1. Latin

    belligerans — waging war

  2. English

    belligerent

  3. English, today

    belligerence

Built from

  • belligerō · Latin — to wage war
  • belliger · Latin — waging war, warlike
  • bellum · Latin — war
  • gerō · Latin — to lead, wage, carry on

From belligerent + ence. belligerent comes from Latin belligerans (“waging war”), present active participle of belligerō (“to wage war”), from belliger (“waging war, warlike”), from bellum (“war”) + -ger (from gerō (“to lead, wage, carry on”)).

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

belligerence in the wild

  • Co-belligerence is the waging of a war in cooperation against a common enemy with or without a military alliance.

    Co-belligerence

  • There was intense belligerence from French diplomats, and armed foreign intervention in Tianjin (Tientsin) in 1870.

    Tianjin Massacre

  • Essentially Fischer attempts to link together a continuum of German belligerence in its "grab for power" weaving it all together into a cohesive theme of German Weltpolitik.

    Germany's Aims in the First World War

  • Industrial leaders have pointed to the strikes as examples of union belligerence and indifference toward the true welfare of their employees.

    Kohler strikes

  • Totman was arrested for drunk driving and belligerence in 1937 and his writing productivity declined in the 1940s.

    Wellyn Totman

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the gerō family

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belligerence — used about once every 159,543 pages · #14,950 · point at the bar for the others