Word.ws English Dictionary

hostilities

Syllables: hos·til·i·tiesUK/hɒˈstɪlɪtiz//hɑˈstɪlɪtiz/

hostilities is the plural of hostility.

Meaning of hostility

Noun

hostility (countable and uncountable, plural hostilities)

  1. (uncountable) The state of being hostile.
    • My resentment and anger towards you caused hostility and a division between us.
  2. (countable) A hostile action, especially a military action. See hostilities for specific plural definition.
    • As the revivals died down in the 1740s, the revivalist camp made concessions to their opponents, admonished prorevivalists who continued with the hostilities, and generally sought to heal divisions.2006, Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin
    Synonyms:
    war, fighting, combat

Noun

hostilities pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Acts of war.
    • The GFAP also called for the deployment of an international armed force, under NATO leadership, of sixty thousand troops to supervise the cessation of hostilities and to provide framework security to enable civilian peace implementation.2005, Ian Oliver, “The Road to Dayton Ohio”, in War & Peace in the Balkans: The Diplomacy of Conflict in the Former Yugoslavia, I.B. Tauris, →ISBN, page 91

Words that rhyme with hostilities

1 more rhymesFewer rhymes

Questions about hostilities

What does hostilities mean?
Hostilities means acts of war.
What is hostilities the plural of?
Hostilities is the plural of hostility.
What part of speech is hostilities?
Hostilities is a noun.
How do you pronounce hostilities?
Hostilities is pronounced /hɑˈstɪlɪtiz/ (US).

Words near hostilities in the dictionary

  1. hostile witness
  2. hostile witnesses
  3. hostilely
  4. hostileness
  5. hostiles
  6. hostilities
  7. hostility
  8. hostilize
  9. hostilized
  10. hostilizes
  11. hostilizing

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hostilities (page history and authors); hostility (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Persent101-hostilities.wav.

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