Other forms: strategies
A strategy is the big long-term plan for winning: the shape of the whole campaign, not the next move. A chess player has a strategy of controlling the centre; a shop has a strategy of selling fewer things to richer customers.
The pair to learn is strategy and tactics. The strategy is the goal and the route to it; the tactics are the small moves you make on the day. The adjective is strategic, as in a strategic decision or a strategically placed chair, and the person who does this planning is a strategist. The word came out of war and still lives there, in nuclear strategy and exit strategy, but you will meet it far more in offices: a marketing strategy, a growth strategy, a strategy meeting that produces nothing. There is an everyday sense too, of a personal method: her strategy for surviving Mondays is a long walk at lunchtime.
1nounstrategyA long-term plan designed to reach an important goal.~44%
“Their strategy was to win the small towns first and leave the city until last.”
synonyms: plan, game plan
2nounartThe art of planning a war or a whole campaign, as opposed to the day-to-day fighting.~54%
“He taught military strategy at the academy for twenty years.”
3nounpersonalA personal method for dealing with something.~2%
“Counting backwards from a hundred is my strategy for falling asleep.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
strategy is a plan.
Also accepted in games: plan
Strategy comes from Ancient Greek strategia, the office of a general, built on strategos, the leader of an army, from stratos, army, and ago, to lead. A strategy was once literally generalship, the thing the man at the top of the army did. Latin took it as strategia, and the boardroom borrowed it from the battlefield.
Latin
stratēgia
English, today
strategy
Built from
From Latin stratēgia. Latin stratēgia, from Ancient Greek στρατηγία (“office of general, command, generalship”), from στρατηγός (“the leader or commander of an army, a general”), from στρατός (“army”) + ἄγω (“to lead, conduct”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA