Word.ws English Dictionary

post-bellum

post-bellum is the alternative spelling of postbellum.

Meaning of postbellum

Adjective

postbellum (not comparable)

  1. Of the period following a war.
    • For most Europeans, a postbellum world had seemed the self-evident future, says Finland’s president, Sauli Niinistö.2023 September 30, Patrick Wintour, quoting Sauli Niinistö, “‘No turning back’: how the Ukraine war has profoundly changed the EU”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
    1. (US) Of the period following the American Civil War, especially used in reference to the South.
      • Midway through Donald McCaig’s unexpectedly diverting novel, “Rhett Butler’s People,” a black man about to be lynched in the post-bellum South asks Rhett to please shoot him dead before the mob breaks into the jail and does worse.2007 November 4, Stephen L. Carter, “Almost a Gentleman”, in The New York Times, →ISSN

Questions about post-bellum

What is post-bellum the alternative spelling of?
Post-bellum is the alternative spelling of postbellum.

Words near post-bellum in the dictionary

  1. post-auction
  2. post-authoritarian
  3. post-bac
  4. post-bacc
  5. post-baccalaureate
  6. post-bellum
  7. post-blackness
  8. post-block
  9. post-bop
  10. post-box
  11. post-boxes

Source and license

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