Word.ws English Dictionary

brush-fire

brush-fire is the alternative form of brushfire.

Meaning of brushfire

Noun

brushfire (plural brushfires)

  1. A large fire in a scrubland or prairie, as opposed to a forest fire, which occurs in forests.
  2. (attributive, figuratively) A war that arises suddenly and is limited in scope or area.
    • It may be a brushfire operation or an operation on the scale of the Korean war; it will certainly not involve the home territories of the United States and Soviet Russia as theaters of hostilities.1958, United States. Congress. House. Committee on Ways and Means. Subcommittee on Foreign Trade Policy, Foreign Trade Policy: Hearings, Eighty-fifth Congress, page 651

Forms of brush-fire

pluralbrush-fires

Questions about brush-fire

What is brush-fire the alternative form of?
Brush-fire is the alternative form of brushfire.

Words near brush-fire in the dictionary

  1. brush wheels
  2. brush wolf
  3. brush wolves
  4. brush-down
  5. brush-downs
  6. brush-fire
  7. brush-fires
  8. brush-footed butterflies
  9. brush-footed butterfly
  10. brush-furred mice
  11. brush-furred mouse

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: brush-fire (page history and authors); brushfire (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “brush-fire.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/brush-fire. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.