Other forms: wars, warring
War is armed fighting between countries, or between organised groups inside one country. Tanks on a border, a city under bombardment, a whole generation of young men in uniform.
It is uncountable when you mean the thing itself (the country went to war) and countable when you mean particular ones (the wars of the last century). English then lends the word to any long, bitter campaign: a price war between supermarkets, a trade war, a turf war, the war on drugs. You declare war, wage war, go to war, and you are at war with someone. A war of words is an argument fought in public, and in British speech a child who arrives scratched and limping has been in the wars. There is a verb, to war, but it is rare and literary — warring factions is the form you actually meet.
1nounwarArmed fighting between countries or between organised armed groups.~96%
“The war lasted four years and redrew the map of Europe.”
2nounlongA long, determined campaign against something or someone.~2%
“Their price war drove three smaller shops out of business.”
3verbfightTo fight a war.~2%
“The two families warred over the same stretch of coast for a century.”
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.
war is an armed conflict.
War arrived with the Normans. Frankish *werʀu meant confusion or quarrel, which became Medieval Latin werra, then Norman French werre — the same word the rest of France turned into guerre. English borrowed it as werre and it drove out a whole shelf of Old English words for fighting: beadu, hild, ġewinn, wīġ. Behind the lot sits the Proto-Indo-European root *wers-, to mix up or confuse, so war began as a word for a mess.
Middle English
werre
English, today
war
From Middle English werre. Middle English werre, from Late Old English werre//wyrre (“armed conflict”), from Anglo-Norman - and fro-nor guerre//werre (compare modern French guerre), from Medieval Latin werra, from Frankish werʀu (“confusion; quarrel”), from Proto-Indo-European wers- (“to mix up, confuse, beat, thresh”). Gradually displaced native beadu, hild, ġewinn, orleġe, wīġ, and many others as the general term for "war" during the Middle English period. Related to Old High German werra (“confusion, strife, quarrel”) and German verwirren (“to confuse”), but not to Wehr (“defense”). Also related to Old Saxon werran (“to confuse, perplex”), Dutch war (“confusion, disarray”), West Frisian war (“struggle, resistance, defense, effort, exertion, activity”), and Romance terms borrowed from Germanic, such as Italian, Portuguese and Spanish guerra (“war”). Not likely related to worse or wurst.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA