Word.ws English Dictionary

rule of engagement

rule of engagement noun: an internal rule among a military, police, etc. force defining the circumstances in which and manner with which to use force.

Noun

rule of engagement (plural rules of engagement)

  1. (in plural) An internal rule among a military, police, etc. force defining the circumstances in which and manner with which to use force.
    • The military, which acknowledged that the killings violated its rules of engagement, announced the deaths on Friday, hours after saying it had recovered the bodies of three other Israeli hostages in Gaza.2023 December 16, Aaron Boxerman, Ben Hubbard, Thomas Fuller, “Israel Says 3 Hostages Bore White Flag Before Being Killed by Troops”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  2. (figuratively, transferred sense) An implied set of rules for when to undertake a certain approach.

Forms of rule of engagement

pluralrules of engagement

Questions about rule of engagement

What does rule of engagement mean?
Rule of engagement means an internal rule among a military, police, etc. force defining the circumstances in which and manner with which to use force.
What part of speech is rule of engagement?
Rule of engagement is a noun.
What is the plural of rule of engagement?
The plural of rule of engagement is rules of engagement.

Words near rule of engagement in the dictionary

  1. rule of 72
  2. rule of Colel
  3. rule of cool
  4. rule of coss
  5. rule of decision
  6. rule of engagement
  7. rule of five
  8. rule of four
  9. rule of law
  10. rule of lenity
  11. rule of man

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: rule of engagement (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: “rule of engagement.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/rule_of_engagement. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.