Word.ws English Dictionary

war of attrition

war of attrition noun: a prolonged war in which the warring sides try to defeat their opponents by wearing them out.

Noun

war of attrition (plural wars of attrition)

  1. A prolonged war in which the warring sides try to defeat their opponents by wearing them out.
    • A bullet for your war of attrition
      And your exploitation of the human condition2021, Gerald Casale, Josh Freese, Josh Hager, Steve Bartek, “I'm Gonna Pay U Back”, in I'm Gonna Pay U Back, performed by DEVO's Gerald V. Casale
    • So far, soldiers on the front lines said they had seen little evidence of escalation beyond this largely slow-moving war of attrition.2021 December 6, Michael Schwirtz, “On Ukrainian Front, Grinding War and Weary Anticipation of Invasion”, in The New York Times, →ISSN
  2. (figuratively) A situation in which opponents try to overcome each other by wearing them out.

war of attrition meaning in Tamil, Arabic, Persian and Vietnamese

war of attrition in Tamil

அரைப்பழிவுப் போர்

war of attrition in Arabic

prolonged exhausting war
حَرْب اِسْتِنْزاف ḥarb istinzāf

war of attrition in Persian

prolonged exhausting war
جنگ فرسایشی jang-e farsâyeši

war of attrition in Vietnamese

prolonged exhausting war
chiến tranh tiêu hao

Synonyms of war of attrition

Forms of war of attrition

pluralwars of attrition

Questions about war of attrition

What does war of attrition mean?
War of attrition means a prolonged war in which the warring sides try to defeat their opponents by wearing them out.
What is war of attrition in Tamil?
War of attrition in Tamil is அரைப்பழிவுப் போர். See War of attrition meaning in Tamil.
What part of speech is war of attrition?
War of attrition is a noun.
What is the plural of war of attrition?
The plural of war of attrition is wars of attrition.

Words near war of attrition in the dictionary

  1. war mongers
  2. war movie
  3. war movies
  4. War of 1812
  5. war of aggression
  6. war of attrition
  7. War of Canudos
  8. war of choice
  9. war of conquest
  10. war of flowers
  11. war of ideas

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: war of attrition (page history and authors); war of attrition (Tamil Wiktionary) (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: LL-Q1860 (eng)-Vealhurl-war of attrition.wav.

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