dirty war

1. 1.

   an offensive conducted by secret police or the military of a regime against revolutionary and terrorist insurgents and marked by the use of kidnapping and torture and murder with civilians often being the victims

   “thousands of people disappeared and were killed during Argentina's dirty war in the late 1970s”

   Broaderoffense

   terrorism

Questions about dirty war

What does dirty war mean?

dirty war means "an offensive conducted by secret police or the military of a regime against revolutionary and terrorist insurgents and marked by the use of kidnapping and torture and murder with civilians often being the victims".

Is dirty war a common word?

dirty war is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.