debellation
debellation noun: the act of conquering or subjugation in war.
Noun
debellation (uncountable)
- The act of conquering or subjugation in war.
- The annihilation of a sovereign state through its complete destruction in a war.
- Strupp goes on to speak of transfer of territory ‘by annexation after debellation’.1951, Hersch Lauterpacht, editor, Annual Digest and Reports of Public International Law Cases […] Year 1946, →ISBN, page 189
- This time, the arguments of those who favored the total debellation of the defeated adversary were again defeated […]2009, Michael Howard, “Preface”, in The Making of Peace: Rulers, States, and the Aftermath of War, →ISBN, page xii
- Synonyms:
- debellatio
Synonyms of debellation
Origin of debellation
Borrowed from Medieval Latin dēbellātiō (“total defeat”), from dēbellō (“conquer, subjugate”).
Questions about debellation
- What does debellation mean?
- Debellation means the act of conquering or subjugation in war.
- What part of speech is debellation?
- Debellation is a noun.
Words near debellation in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: debellation (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: “debellation.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/debellation. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.