close order

1. 1.

   a military formation for drill or marching

   Broadermilitary formation

   military

Questions about close order

What does close order mean?

close order means "a military formation for drill or marching".

Is close order a common word?

close order is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.