Battalion

How to spell battalion

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce battalion

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does battalion mean?

1. nounA large body of soldiers, typically several hundred strong and made up of multiple companies.
2. nounA large number of people or things working together or arriving at once.

Battalion in a sentence

• The entire battalion marched across the parade ground at dawn.

• A whole battalion of volunteers turned up to clean the beach.

• His grandfather served in an infantry battalion during the war.

• The company hired a battalion of lawyers to handle the case.

Where does battalion come from?

Language of origin: Italian

This word travelled into English from Italian, where battaglione meant a great squadron or large body of soldiers. It was built on battaglia, the Italian word for 'battle', which itself descended from the Latin battualia, meaning 'fighting and fencing exercises', from the verb battuere 'to beat or strike'. English picked the word up in the late 1500s, largely through French bataillon, at a time when continental Italian military organisation and vocabulary were widely admired and copied. The same battuere root quietly survives in a crowd of everyday words such as 'battle', 'batter', 'combat' and even 'debate'. The spelling trap is a direct legacy of that history: the doubled t reflects the Latin battuere, while the single l comes from the Italian and French forms, so writers who double the wrong letter end up with 'battallion' or 'batalion'.

How the word is built

• battal- (from Italian battaglione, a large body of troops, ultimately from battaglia 'battle')
• -ion (noun suffix)