collateral damage
"collateral-damage" is a 16-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“collateral damage” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a noun. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 17
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - Damage to civilian property or civilian casualties that is the unintended result of military operations.
Corpus desk
Index EN-collateral-damage · collateral damage · English
collateral damage · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 17 letters
- VOW-7 7 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "C" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | collateral damage |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “collateral damage” in English
Rare enough to double-check
collateral damage is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as anoun. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 3 senses are on record.
Our edit-distance generator produced no likely misspellings for collateral damage, which points to an orthography that plays by predictable English rules. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
This headword's origin isn't recorded in our source data, so its spelling is easiest to reason about phoneme by phoneme, absent a documented history. The correct English form is collateral damage, spelled C-O-L-L-A-T-E-R-A-L- -D-A-M-A-G-E.
Definition
- 1Damage to civilian property or civilian casualties that is the unintended result of military operations.
- 2Harm to innocent people that results from policy decisions.
- 3Unintended victims of an attack targeted at someone or something else.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how collateral damage appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
A certain amount of collateral damage and destruction to the surrounding environment has always been viewed as a necessary but generally undesirable by-product of military conflict.
But the most critical tension concerns the need to balance minimal own-casualties and low collateral damage with operational effectiveness.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.