Word.ws English Dictionary

element of surprise

element of surprise noun: the strategic advantage afforded to a party when its opposition may be caught by surprise.

Noun

element of surprise (plural elements of surprise)

  1. (idiomatic) The strategic advantage afforded to a party when its opposition may be caught by surprise.
    • We should attack the enemy's camp now while we still have the element of surprise.
    • We exist separately from ACT UP/New York because it's impossible to conduct small actions [i.e. protests] that rely on the element of surprise for their success, when you need to tell 200 people about them first.1992 February 2, Jen Wofford, quoting Garance Franke-Ruta, “Activists Protest Price of AIDS Drug”, in Gay Community News, volume 19, number 28, page 5

Forms of element of surprise

pluralelements of surprise

Questions about element of surprise

What does element of surprise mean?
Element of surprise means the strategic advantage afforded to a party when its opposition may be caught by surprise.
What part of speech is element of surprise?
Element of surprise is a noun.
What is the plural of element of surprise?
The plural of element of surprise is elements of surprise.

Words near element of surprise in the dictionary

  1. elemeno
  2. element
  3. element 0
  4. element number
  5. element numbers
  6. element of surprise
  7. element zero
  8. elemental
  9. elemental magic
  10. elementalism
  11. elementalist

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: element of surprise (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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-element of surprise.ogg.

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