Meaning
Attack by gunfire, bombing, or other weapons that comes from one's own side rather than the enemy and kills or wounds allied forces; the wording is a euphemism that softens the reality of such accidents. By extension it describes any act that damages a person's own allies, party, or colleagues. Standard across all major English varieties, neutral in military use and often ironic in civilian use. Military euphemism; in civilian use it tends to carry irony or criticism of whoever inflicted the damage. Regional use: General English (20th-century military origin).
Origin
A 20th-century military coinage. The use of 'friendly' for allied troops arose in the First World War, and the Oxford English Dictionary's earliest evidence for the compound is a New York Times item of 18 October 1918, tracked down by the lexicographer Ben Zimmer; the OED's second edition also cites a 1925 reference to a wartime trench term. The United States armed forces adopted the full expression, and the historian S. L. A. Marshall used it in Men Against Fire (1947). Heavy media coverage from the Vietnam era onward, and especially the 1991 Gulf War, fixed it in general vocabulary, though the term itself predates Vietnam by decades. 'Blue-on-blue' is the British and NATO counterpart.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- blue on blue
- blue-on-blue
- fratricide
- friendly-fire incident
Usage Examples
- The patrol was hit not by insurgents but by friendly fire from a nervous checkpoint gunner.
- When the treasury spokesman briefed against his own chancellor, commentators called it friendly fire at its worst.
- The outage was traced to a botched update from our own infrastructure team, a piece of friendly fire no external attacker could have matched.