Crusade

How to spell crusade

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crusade

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crusade mean?

1. nounA vigorous, sustained campaign for a cause or against something believed to be wrong.
2. verbTo lead or take part in a determined campaign for a cause.

Crusade in a sentence

• noun

  The newspaper launched a crusade against reckless driving on rural roads.

• verb

  He chose to crusade for safer working conditions in the factory.

• noun

  Her lifelong crusade for cleaner rivers earned her a national award.

• verb

  Local parents began to crusade against the closure of the library.

Where does crusade come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Latin crux, meaning 'cross', the very symbol that medieval Christian fighters stitched onto their tunics when they marched to recover the Holy Land. From crux came the Vulgar Latin verb cruciare and the noun forms that spread across the Romance languages, giving Spanish cruzada and Old French croisade, both literally meaning 'an enterprise marked with the cross'. English first used the older spelling 'croisade', borrowed straight from French, but writers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reshaped it toward the Spanish-flavoured 'crusade' that we keep today. Over time the religious sense broadened, so that any energetic, morally driven campaign against a perceived evil could be called a crusade. The same crux root survives in 'crucial', 'crucifix' and 'excruciating', and remembering that buried cross helps explain why the word is spelled with the -us- you can hear but might second-guess.

How the word is built

• crus- (from Latin crux: cross)
• -ade (noun suffix denoting an action or campaign)