Word.ws English Dictionary

unholy alliance

unholy alliance noun: a coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups, especially if one is religious, for ad hoc or hidden gain. (See examples.).

Noun

unholy alliance (uncountable)

  1. A coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups, especially if one is religious, for ad hoc or hidden gain. (See examples.)

Origin of unholy alliance

A play on the name of the "Holy Alliance" (a coalition of Russia, Austria, and Prussia formed in 1815), used in 1855 for Western European alliances with the Ottoman Empire against the interests of Russia, Greece, and most of the Balkans. Later uses were more literally just unholy + alliance, such as the use in the 1912 US Progressive Party platform, which was quoted by Theodore Roosevelt in his autobiography: : "To destroy this invisible Government, to dissolve the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day."

Questions about unholy alliance

What does unholy alliance mean?
Unholy alliance means a coalition among seemingly antagonistic groups, especially if one is religious, for ad hoc or hidden gain. (See examples.).
What part of speech is unholy alliance?
Unholy alliance is a noun.

Words near unholy alliance in the dictionary

  1. unholster
  2. unholstered
  3. unholstering
  4. unholsters
  5. unholy
  6. unholy alliance
  7. unholy trinities
  8. unholy trinity
  9. unholy water
  10. unhome
  11. unhomed

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: unholy alliance (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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