Battle

How to spell battle

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce battle

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does battle mean?

1. nounA sustained fight between armed forces, or any hard struggle against difficulty or opposition.
2. verbTo fight or struggle persistently to achieve or overcome something.

Battle in a sentence

• noun

  The famous battle was fought on open ground near the river.

• verb

  Firefighters had to battle the blaze through the night.

• noun

  Recovering from the injury was a long, exhausting battle.

• verb

  She continues to battle against the proposed road scheme.

Where does battle come from?

Language of origin: French

The word comes from the Late Latin battualia, meaning 'fighting exercises' or 'training combats', which was built on the verb battuere, meaning 'to beat' or 'to strike'. It passed into Old French as bataille, where it described an organised fight between armed forces, and English borrowed it in the 1200s. The same battuere root is the source of a whole family of related English words, including 'batter', 'combat', 'batter', and 'battalion'. The double 't' that trips some writers up survives directly from that beating root, while the soft '-le' ending arrived through the French spelling. Knowing the word literally means 'a beating' helps fix both the doubled 't' and the unstressed final '-le'.

How the word is built

• batt- (from Late Latin battuere: to beat, strike)
• -le (noun/verb suffix)