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vanquished

adjectiveC2Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,048 of 15,258neutral

Vanquished means thoroughly defeated. The vanquished army, vanquished at last, victor and vanquished.

It is literary and formal, and it survives chiefly in the pair with victor. As a noun the vanquished means the losing side taken together, and the phrase about how history is written by the victors is the standing comment on what happens to them.

Definitions of vanquished

  1. 1adjectivevanquishedThoroughly defeated.C2

    “The vanquished army laid down its weapons and marched away in silence.”

vanquished is a state.

Where it comes from

  1. Proto-Indo-European

    *weyk-

  2. Latin

    vincō

  3. Old French

    veincre

  4. Middle English

    venquysshen

  5. English

    vanquish

  6. English, today

    vanquished

vanquish comes from Middle English venquysshen, vaynquisshen, borrowed from a conjugated form of Old French veincre, from Latin vincō.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

vanquished in the wild

  • Prominent members of this race include Hiranyaksha, Hiranyakashipu, and Mahabali, all of whom overran the earth, and required three of Vishnu's avataras to be vanquished.

    Daitya

  • Ur-Lumma vanquished Enannatum and occupied Lagash, but he was eventually repelled by Entemena, the son of Enannatum.

    Ur-Lumma

  • Lu-ishan also appears in the inscriptions of Sargon of Akkad, who vanquished him when he conquered Elam and Marhasi.

    Luh-ishan

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 vincō family

convincevanquish

vanquished — used about once every 1,710 pages · #6,048 · point at the bar for the others