Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An armed attack, especially one made from a place surrounded by enemy forces.
- noun A flight of a combat aircraft on a mission.
- intransitive verb To go on a sortie.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A going forth; a sally; specifically, the issuing of a body of troops from a besieged place to attack the besiegers; an outrush of a beleaguered garrison.
- noun Same as
postlude .
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun (Mil.) The sudden issuing of a body of troops, usually small, from a besieged place to attack or harass the besiegers; a sally.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun military An offensive
military mission. Used originally to mean an attack from a fortress, but most commonly used today to describe a single mission by a military aircraft. - verb transitive To
sally .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a military action in which besieged troops burst forth from their position
- noun (military) an operational flight by a single aircraft (as in a military operation)
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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For the military, the cost of a sortie is critical.
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For the military, the cost of a sortie is critical.
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This plan, which came to be called a sortie, involved the maximum number of tanks, equipped with the Rhino device, that could be brought into position, allowing for the variation of the terrain.
Steel Victory Yeide, Harry 2003
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The object of the sortie was a vague idea to push forward, if possible, to Versailles.
Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris Henry Labouchere 1871
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As for the sortie, which is to revictual Paris, by forcing the Prussian lines, it is simply absurd to talk of it.
Diary of the Besieged Resident in Paris Henry Labouchere 1871
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Then the German general struck in with emphasis, 'I regret that I cannot do what you ask,' he said; 'but as to making a sortie, that is just as impossible as the defence of Sedan.
Germany from the Earliest Period Volume 4 Wolfgang Menzel 1835
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The moment the rock was thought to be in a state of sufficient security, the party who composed what might be called the sortie, sallied forth on their anxious expedition.
The Prairie James Fenimore Cooper 1820
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For Goodrich, the sortie was her first humanitarian mission.
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A sortie is a deployment or dispatch of one military unit.
unknown title 2009
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Scrap the Constellation 'sortie' (Apollo redux) program and replace it with a dedicated lunar base program.
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