Meaning
A contest in which two people or groups each refuse to yield, each betting the other will break first. Neither side argues so much as endures - through stubbornness, silence, or escalating pressure - and the winner is the party with the greater determination rather than the better case. It is the standard description for stand-offs between parents and toddlers, teachers and pupils, management and unions. Usually sympathetic to whichever party seems weaker; with a toddler or a patient it is a contest of endurance, not reason. Regional use: General English.
Origin
A transparent metaphor from the 'battle of X' family of idioms (battle of wits, battle royal), applied to the Victorian era's favourite faculty, the will. No major dictionary publishes a first-use year for it and the freely consulted sources supply no early citation, so it is reported here as a nineteenth- or early twentieth-century coinage on pattern evidence alone. Collins's corpus shows it remains frequent in British newspaper writing, and its persistence owes much to its usefulness wherever conflict is psychological rather than physical - food, bedtime, contracts, borders. This entry follows the catalogue's treatment of comparable phrases, such as 'draw first blood', for which dictionaries publish no dating and the confidence field is marked down accordingly.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- battle of wills
- battles of wills
- clash of wills
- war of wills
Usage Examples
- She recognised the customer's tirade for what it was - the opening move of a battle of wills - and simply waited.
- The strike settled into a battle of wills between a board that could wait and a workforce that could not.
- Bedtime had become a nightly battle of wills, with the four-year-old deploying increasingly theatrical arguments.