tug-of-war

1. 1.

   any hard struggle between equally matched groups

   Broaderconflict
2. 2.

   a contest in which teams pull of opposite ends of a rope; the team dragged across a central line loses

   Broaderathletic contest

Questions about tug-of-war

What does tug-of-war mean?

tug-of-war means "any hard struggle between equally matched groups". That is the primary sense; the word has 2 in total, listed in full on this page.

How many syllables are in tug-of-war?

tug-of-war has 3 syllables: tu-g-of--war. The stress falls on "tu".

Is tug-of-war a common word?

tug-of-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.