Word.ws English Dictionary

trainband

trainband noun: a company of trained civilian militia operating in England and North America between the 16th and the 18th centuries.

Noun

trainband (plural trainbands)

  1. (historical) A company of trained civilian militia operating in England and North America between the 16th and the 18th centuries.
    • A train-band captain eke was he / Of famous London town.1782, William Cowper, The Diverting History of John Gilpen
    • Another said that he should be glad to know how the Devonshire trainbands, who had fled in confusion before Monmouth's scythemen, would have faced the household troops of Lewis1849–1861, Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James the Second, volume (please specify |volume=I to V), London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, →OCLC

Forms of trainband

pluraltrainbands

Origin of trainband

Apparently a contraction of trained band.

Questions about trainband

What does trainband mean?
Trainband means a company of trained civilian militia operating in England and North America between the 16th and the 18th centuries.
What part of speech is trainband?
Trainband is a noun.
What is the plural of trainband?
The plural of trainband is trainbands.

Words near trainband in the dictionary

  1. trainage
  2. trainagraph
  3. trainagraphs
  4. Trainas
  5. trainasium
  6. trainband
  7. trainbands
  8. trainbearer
  9. trainbearers
  10. trainboy
  11. trainboys

Source and license

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