battle

1. 1.

   battle or contend against in or as if in a battle

   “The Kurds are combating Iraqi troops in Northern Iraq”

   “We must combat the prejudices against other races”

   “they battled over the budget”

   Synonymscombat

   Broadercontend

   Narrowerdogfightwrestle

Other forms of battle

plural

battles·

past tense

battled·

present participle

battling·

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about battle

What does battle mean?

battle means "a hostile meeting of opposing military forces in the course of a war". That is the primary sense; the word has 4 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in battle?

battle has 2 syllables: bat-tle. The stress falls on "bat". In IPA it is /ˈbætəl/.

What is another word for battle?

Close synonyms include conflict, fight, engagement, struggle, conflict. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is battle a common word?

battle is banded "Core" — among the few thousand words that carry most english. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.

What rhymes with battle?

1 word rhymes with battle. Rhymes are matched on the phonemes from the last stressed vowel onward, which is the definition a reader has in their head.