Meaning
Exhausted by, disillusioned with or emotionally numbed by prolonged war - said of soldiers, civilians and whole nations, as in a war-weary public. By extension it describes anyone tired of a long-running conflict or dispute, and in a specialist aviation sense a combat aircraft too battle-damaged to repair, fit only to be scrapped or cannibalized. Standard in war reporting, usually with public, troops or nation. Battle-weary stresses the physical exhaustion of troops; war-weary leans toward emotional and political fatigue. The aviation sense is historical, chiefly of the 1940s. Regional use: English worldwide; flagged as used in US English by the OED.
Origin
The OED's earliest evidence for war-weary is 1811, in the writing of W. Dimond - verified directly on the factsheet - and the entry notes the word is used in US English alongside its British home. The compound follows an older pattern: the OED dates the parallel form war-worn to 1616 and the noun war-weariness to 1864. Merriam-Webster defines it as tired of or depressed by war, plus the harder-edged aviation sense for a combat plane so worn or damaged as to be beyond repair, matching the OED's aviation label of the 1940s. The word's greatest period of currency was the First World War: the 1918 anthology Patriotic Pieces from the Great War prints Katrina Trask's appeal, 'fellow-citizens of storm-tossed lands, War weary! Sounds the bugle-note! Arise!' It has stayed current for any long conflict and, figuratively, for any draining dispute.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- battle-weary
- war-worn
Usage Examples
- After a decade of fighting, the country's war-weary voters swept the hawks from power.
- The war-weary sergeant had long since stopped reading the casualty postings.
- War-weary donors cut funding as the charity's feud with the regulator dragged into its fifth year.