Word.ws English Dictionary

shadow war

shadow war noun: a form of armed conflict, conducted secretly in the nexus between war and peace, where various actors utilise different means to achieve their goals.

Noun

shadow war (countable and uncountable, plural shadow wars)

  1. A form of armed conflict, conducted secretly in the nexus between war and peace, where various actors utilise different means to achieve their goals.
    • The Iran-Israel conflict was once limited largely to a shadow war.2024 October 28, Scott Peterson, “Israeli strikes inside Iran cross a threshold. How will Iran respond?”, in The Christian Science Monitor

Forms of shadow war

pluralshadow wars

Origin of shadow war

From shadow + war.

Questions about shadow war

What does shadow war mean?
Shadow war means a form of armed conflict, conducted secretly in the nexus between war and peace, where various actors utilise different means to achieve their goals.
What part of speech is shadow war?
Shadow war is a noun.
What is the plural of shadow war?
The plural of shadow war is shadow wars.

Words near shadow war in the dictionary

  1. shadow trade
  2. shadow trades
  3. shadow trading
  4. shadow volume
  5. shadow volumes
  6. shadow war
  7. shadow wars
  8. shadow witch
  9. shadow witches
  10. shadow work
  11. shadow zone

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shadow war (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: “shadow war.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/shadow_war. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.