15 common military terms and their origins and meanings

English includes words that, originating in the vocabulary of warfare, have been applied to competitive contexts such as sports and business; others that did not originate in that realm are associated with both the military and other endeavors.

Here’s a list of terms pertaining to military units and formations that also have other, sometimes derivative, usages:

1. Army. Derived from medieval Latin armata (“army”)—also the source of the Spanish term armada, meaning “war fleet”—referring to a nation’s entire body of land forces or to one major unit of that body.

2. Brigade. Derived from Italian briga (“quarrel”), a word for a unit consisting of thousands of soldiers or, by extension, to any large group of people organized according to common belief or toward achievement of a common goal; brigadier is a military rank for someone in command of a brigade, and related words are brigand (originally meaning “soldier” but later denoting a bandit) and brig and brigantine for types of warships during the Age of Sail (the use of the former as prison ships led to brig being applied to military prisons).