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  1. sortie love

Definitions

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

  1. n. An armed attack, especially one made from a place surrounded by enemy forces.
  2. n. A flight of a combat aircraft on a mission.
  3. v. To go on a sortie.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

  1. n. A going forth; a sally; specifically, the issuing of a body of troops from a besieged place to attack the besiegers; an outrush of a beleaguered garrison.
  2. n. Same as postlude.

Wiktionary

  1. n. military An offensive military mission. Used originally to mean an attack from a fortress, but most commonly used today to describe a single mission by a military aircraft.
  2. v. transitive To sally.

GNU Webster's 1913

  1. n. (Mil.) The sudden issuing of a body of troops, usually small, from a besieged place to attack or harass the besiegers; a sally.

WordNet 3.0

  1. n. a military action in which besieged troops burst forth from their position
  2. n. (military) an operational flight by a single aircraft (as in a military operation)

Etymologies

  1. Borrowing from French sortie (Wiktionary)
  2. French, from feminine past participle of sortir, to go out, from Old French. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)

Examples

  • “For the military, the cost of a sortie is critical.”

    Would You Bring Back NGLT-or SLI? - NASA Watch

  • “This plan, which came to be called a sortie, involved the maximum number of tanks, equipped with the Rhino device, that could be brought into position, allowing for the variation of the terrain.”

    Steel Victory

  • “The object of the sortie was a vague idea to push forward, if possible, to Versailles.”

    Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris

  • “As for the sortie, which is to revictual Paris, by forcing the Prussian lines, it is simply absurd to talk of it.”

    Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris

  • “Then the German general struck in with emphasis, 'I regret that I cannot do what you ask,' he said; 'but as to making a sortie, that is just as impossible as the defence of Sedan.”

    Germany from the Earliest Period Volume 4

  • “The moment the rock was thought to be in a state of sufficient security, the party who composed what might be called the sortie, sallied forth on their anxious expedition.”

    The Prairie

  • “For Goodrich, the sortie was her first humanitarian mission.”

    Air Force Times - News

  • “Scrap the Constellation 'sortie' (Apollo redux) program and replace it with a dedicated lunar base program.”

    Dear Mr. Augustine - NASA Watch

  • “The goal of the "sortie" was to learn how to use a compass.”

    epargner - French Word-A-Day

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synonyms (3)

Words with the same meaning

  1. sally
  1. issue
  1. scramble

hypernyms (4)

Words that are more generic or abstract

  1. action
  1. military action
  1. flying
  1. flight

same context (8)

Words that are found in similar contexts

  1. foray
  1. inroad
  1. skirmish
  1. largeur
  1. counter-attack
  1. counterstroke
  1. onslaught
  1. enterprize

rhymes (4)

Words with the same terminal sound

  1. corti
  1. forty
  1. shorty
  1. sporty

reverse dictionary (3)

Words that contain this word in their definition

  1. sortie
  1. sally
  1. pied-à-terre

tags (1)

Free-form, user-generated categorization

  1. military

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‘sortie’ has been looked up 2211 times, loved by 4 people, added to 22 lists, and has a Scrabble score of 6.