Word.ws English Dictionary

volun-told

volun-told adjective: nominally voluntary but understood to be an order.

Adjective

volun-told (comparative more volun-told, superlative most volun-told)

  1. (US, slang) Nominally voluntary but understood to be an order.
    • Yet military life includes times when requests, though not explicit, are understood as orders, says Michael Weinstein, a former U.S. military lawyer and founder of MRFF. The U.S. military word for it, he notes, is “volun-told.”2026 April 23, Anna Mulrine Grobe, Sophie Hills, quoting Michael Weinstein, “Pete Hegseth’s religious rhetoric stirs debate in military”, in The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, Massachusetts...

Antonyms of volun-told

Forms of volun-told

comparativemore volun-told
superlativemost volun-told

Origin of volun-told

Blend of voluntary + told

Questions about volun-told

What does volun-told mean?
Volun-told means nominally voluntary but understood to be an order.
What part of speech is volun-told?
Volun-told is an adjective.

Words near volun-told in the dictionary

  1. volumometers
  2. volumometric
  3. volumometrical
  4. volumometry
  5. volumptuous
  6. volun-told
  7. volunpeer
  8. volunpeers
  9. voluntariate
  10. voluntariates
  11. voluntaries

Source and license

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