Word.ws English Dictionary

spoils of war

spoils of war noun: any profits extracted as the result of winning a war or other military activity.

spoils of war: any profits extracted as the result of winning a war or other military activity
Image: Frans Hogenberg, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

spoils of war pl (plural only)

  1. (plural, plural-only) Any profits extracted as the result of winning a war or other military activity.
    • Theſe ſo great Slaughters, Nations mighty dread, / Like Whirlwinds through ſo many Cities ſpread, / Which might have been anothers cloſing Fame, / Were but his Marches Actions; thus he came: / And in ſo many glorious Conqueſts ſhar'd / The Spoils of War, while he for War prepar'd.1701, Lucius Annaeus Seneca, “Troades; or The Royal Captives. A Tragedy, Written Originally in Latin, by Lucius Annæus Seneca, the Philosopher. Englished by Sir Edward Sherburne, Knight. With...
    • For according to that Hiſtorian [Josephus] upon Nebuchadnezzar [II]'s coming to Babylon in the year after, upon his father's death, and becoming Lord of all his father's Empire, He with the SPOILS of WAR magnificently repair'd, and deckt the Temple of Bel, &c.1725, Benjamin Marshall, “A Chapter. Shewing that the Abstracted Nature of the Seventy Weeks of Years of this Prophecy, as the Said Number of Weeks of Years Contains Exactly Four Hundred and Ninety...

Proper noun capitalized: Spoils of War

Spoils of War

  1. The eighth sura (chapter) of the Qur'an.

spoils of war meaning in Urdu and Vietnamese

spoils of war in Urdu

profits extracted as the result of winning a war
مَالِ غَنِیمَت māl-i ġanīmat

spoils of war in Vietnamese

profits extracted as the result of winning a war
chiến lợi phẩm

Examples of spoils of war in a sentence

  • The taking of the spoils of war was important to both Muslim and Christian communities during the Crusades.2011, Alexander Gillespie, A History of the Laws of War: Volume 2: The Customs and Laws of War with regards to Civilians in Times of...
  • Thousands of women and girls were treated as "spoils of war" and openly sold in slave markets to IS militants.2016 October 27, “Sakharov prize: Yazidi women win EU freedom prize”, in BBC News, archived from the original on 28 Oct 2016:

Questions about spoils of war

What does spoils of war mean?
Spoils of war means any profits extracted as the result of winning a war or other military activity.
What is spoils of war in Urdu?
Spoils of war in Urdu is مَالِ غَنِیمَت (māl-i ġanīmat). See Spoils of war meaning in Urdu.
How do you use spoils of war in a sentence?
The taking of the spoils of war was important to both Muslim and Christian communities during the Crusades.
What part of speech is spoils of war?
Spoils of war can be a noun or a proper noun.

Words near spoils of war in the dictionary

  1. spoiling the market
  2. spoiling the ship for a ha'p'orth of tar
  3. spoilings
  4. spoilless
  5. spoils
  6. spoils of war
  7. spoils somebody rotten
  8. spoils someone rotten
  9. spoils system
  10. spoils systems
  11. spoils the market

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spoils of war (page history and authors); Spoils of 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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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-spoils of war.ogg.

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