Word.ws English Dictionary

counteruse

counteruse noun: the act of using something against someone or something.

Noun

counteruse (countable and uncountable, plural counteruses)

  1. The act of using something against someone or something.
    • The critical challenge now is not how to ward off a sneak attack but how to control an escalation that occurs in plain sight — for instance, a conventional conflict that goes wrong, leading to nuclear saber rattling, leading to the first use of a few small nuclear weapons on the battlefield...2024 December 2, William Langewiesche, “The Secret Pentagon War Game That Offers a Stark Warning for Our Time”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC

Verb

counteruse (third-person singular simple present counteruses, present participle counterusing, simple past and past participle counterused)

  1. (transitive) To use something against (someone or something).
    • By the story's end, both sides are using and counterusing this technique, evading each other "to and fro along an ever increasing complexity of mutually perpendicular time axes." Indeed, the final count exceeds 75(!) time axes, making two-dimensional time look rather skimpy by comparison.1993, Paul J. Nahin, Time Machines: Time Travel in Physics, Metaphysics, and Science Fiction, Woodbury, N.Y.: American Institute of Physics, →ISBN, page 164

Forms of counteruse

Noun
pluralcounteruses
Verb
third-person singular presentcounteruses
present participlecounterusing
past participlecounterused
pastcounterused

Origin of counteruse

From counter- + use.

Questions about counteruse

What does counteruse mean?
Counteruse means the act of using something against someone or something.
What part of speech is counteruse?
Counteruse can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of counteruse?
The plural of counteruse is counteruses.

Words near counteruse in the dictionary

  1. countertwistings
  2. countertype
  3. countertypes
  4. counterurbanisation
  5. counterurbanization
  6. counteruse
  7. counterused
  8. counteruses
  9. counterusing
  10. countervail
  11. countervailability

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: counteruse (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.

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