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 May 6, 2026) - Damage to civilian property or civilian casualties that is the unintended result of military operations.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | collateral damage |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Noun |
| Letters | 17 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Where “collateral damage” sits in English frequency
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Using “collateral damage”
The practical upshot for anyone who landed here from a spell-check.
- The one correct English spelling is C-O-L-L-A-T-E-R-A-L- -D-A-M-A-G-E - every other letter order is a misspelling in standard orthography.
- Browse more English words and confusable pairs in the same reference. English words
Data Source
Wiktionary (via kaikki.org), licensed under CC BY-SA & GFDL. Word ordering uses an open word-frequency list; misspelling variants are generated by edit-distance from the correct headword.