body count
Word Rarity
Uncommon
Frequency: Zipf frequency 4.73 in modern English
17
Scrabble Score
9
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The number of persons or bodies counted as casualties, especially fatalities, or victims.
noun
The number of persons or bodies counted as casualties, especially fatalities, or victims.
noun
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see body, count.
Example Sentences
- "Senator BYRD of West Virginia. Why do we minimize our losses as apparently we do? I find it extremely difficult to believe that there have been 6,200 VC and NVA killed by body count, whereas we have only lost 193 Americans and 335 ARVN troops."
- "Navy Lt. Cole Cowden, accused of indecent assault and conduct unbecoming an officer at the 1991 Tailhook convention, says he is the target of a quest for a 'body count' in the investigation and not because he did anything wrong at the annual convention of Naval aviators."
- "In addition to racking up what looks like a substantial offscreen body count, the movie at one point offers an eight-second introduction for a sleazy used-car salesman character for the sole purpose of justifying Tripp and Creech laying waste to his inventory."
- "On Tuesday, three stories that led the home page of Columbia Journalism Review were about Colorado, a state that has become a battlefield in the new newspaper wars— where journalists fight their hedge-fund owners."
- "In the case of the liquidation of the Slonim ghetto in September 1942, police-men “bragged about the number of women they had abused in this manner and tried to outdo one another.” Much like keeping score of one’s body count, the numbers of rapes served individual perpetrators as a personal record of their own virility and masculinity, and as a means of group bonding."
- "The novelty of women’s public protest shifted from a shocking sight of women filling the streets to a body count. Women protested their living conditions of impoverishment, and demanded their rights as citizens (not subjects) of India, and they were killed."
Etymology
Coined by the U.S. military during the Vietnam War in the sense "number of killed enemy combatants", in 1962 according to Merriam-Webster.