Word.ws English Dictionary

onfall

onfall noun: a falling on or upon; an attack, onset, or assault.

Noun

onfall (plural onfalls)

  1. A falling on or upon; an attack, onset, or assault.
    • Are we to have military onfall; and death also by starvation?1837, Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History […], volume (please specify |volume=I to III), London: Chapman and Hall, →OCLC, (please specify the book or page number)
    • The onfall of the bishops had helped to wreck this possibility, [...]1906, William Henry Fitchett, Wesley and his century: a study in spiritual forces
  2. A fall of rain or snow.
  3. The fall of the evening.

Verb

onfall (third-person singular simple present onfalls, present participle onfalling, simple past onfell, past participle onfallen)

  1. (transitive) To fall on or upon.
    • [...] have been formed and ripened in large numbers, especially on the shaded ower sides of the leaves, the mycelium is practically exhausted, and as these processes are completed towards the end of the summer, the leaf so onfalls.1889, Harry Marshall Ward, Diseases of plants
    • 'the temple caught fire from the onfallen lightning' [...]1992, Edgar C. Polomé, Werner Winter, Reconstructing languages and cultures
  2. (transitive) To assault, attack.

onfall meaning in Urdu

onfall in Urdu

حملہ, وار, یورش

Examples of onfall in a sentence

  • Along with your 'brethren, Get ready your scaling ladders, And your engines of onfall and assault, To attack the walls of Khung.2004, James Legge, The Shih King:
  • Six great land battles I count, with four upon the sea, and seven-and-fifty onfalls, skirmishes and bushments.2008, Arthur Conan Doyle, The White Company:
  • Quasivertical and quasihorizontal faults filled with crushed rocks can substantially change the amplitude of a seismic wave behind the fault in comparison with the amplitude of an onfalling wave [...]2008, V. V. Adushkin, Ivan Nemchinov, Catastrophic events caused by cosmic objects:

Forms of onfall

Noun
pluralonfalls
Verb
third-person singular presentonfalls
present participleonfalling
pastonfell
past participleonfallen

Origin of onfall

From Middle English onfal, onfalle, equivalent to on- + fall. Cognate with Dutch aanval (“an attack, assault”), German Anfall (“an attack, seizure, fit”), Swedish anfall (“an attack, offensive, assault”). Compare also Middle English onfallynge (“an onslaught, attack”).

Questions about onfall

What does onfall mean?
Onfall means a falling on or upon; an attack, onset, or assault.
What is onfall in Urdu?
Onfall in Urdu is حملہ, وار, یورش. See Onfall meaning in Urdu.
How do you use onfall in a sentence?
Along with your 'brethren, Get ready your scaling ladders, And your engines of onfall and assault, To attack the walls of Khung.
What part of speech is onfall?
Onfall can be a noun or a verb.
What is the plural of onfall?
The plural of onfall is onfalls.

Words near onfall in the dictionary

  1. oneupmanship
  2. oneway
  3. Onești
  4. ONF
  5. ONF.
  6. onfall
  7. onfallen
  8. onfalling
  9. onfalls
  10. onfell
  11. ONFI

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: onfall (page history and authors); onfall (Urdu Wiktionary) (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: “onfall.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/onfall. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.