Word.ws English Dictionary

tip of the spear

tip of the spear noun: the foremost person or group; those on the front lines.

Noun

tip of the spear

  1. The foremost person or group; those on the front lines.
    • Bannon called Argentina “the tip of the tip of the spear of the fight for the Judeo-Christian west”.2024 December 10, Tom Phillips, Facundo Iglesia, quoting Steve Bannon, “Maga on the River Plate as global populist right descends on Argentina”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
  2. The leading position of someone in a difficult situation.
    • In this and similar theorizing of criminal-justice reform, Simonson draws the focus of reform advocates to the tip of the spear—police administration.2021, Trevor George Gardner, “By Any Means: A Philosophical Frame for Rulemaking Reform in Criminal Law”, in Yale Law Journal Forum, page 803

Questions about tip of the spear

What does tip of the spear mean?
Tip of the spear means the foremost person or group; those on the front lines.
What part of speech is tip of the spear?
Tip of the spear is a noun.

Words near tip of the spear in the dictionary

  1. tip jar
  2. tip jars
  3. tip of the hat
  4. tip of the ice cube
  5. tip of the iceberg
  6. tip of the spear
  7. tip of the Stetson
  8. tip off
  9. tip one's hand
  10. tip one's hat
  11. tip out

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: tip of the spear (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.

Last updated:

Cite this entry: “tip of the spear.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/tip_of_the_spear. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.