Ceasefire

How to spell ceasefire

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce ceasefire

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does ceasefire mean?

1. nounAn agreed halt to fighting or shooting between opposing forces.

Ceasefire in a sentence

• Both sides agreed to a temporary ceasefire to allow aid through.

• The fragile ceasefire collapsed within days of being signed.

Where does ceasefire come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a modern compound that simply joins the verb 'cease' to the noun 'fire' in its military sense of shooting weapons. 'Cease' arrived in English in the 1300s through Old French cesser, which came from the Latin cessare, meaning 'to hold back, delay, or stop', a form built on cedere, 'to go away or yield', the same root that gives us 'cede' and 'recede'. 'Fire' is the much older native word, from Old English fyr, and in this context it carries its gunnery meaning of discharging weapons rather than its meaning of flame. The combined term emerged in military English around the time of the World Wars to name an agreed halt in shooting, and it became standard diplomatic vocabulary in the twentieth century. The spelling trap is the soft 'c' that sounds like an 's' in 'cease', plus the fact that it is written as one solid word with no hyphen or space.

How the word is built

• cease (to stop, from Latin cessare)
• fire (the act of shooting, from Old English fyr)