stay-behind
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.01 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
10
Letters
3
Syllables
10
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
An agent who resides in a foreign country, and can be activated in certain circumstances.
Example Sentences
- "In areas where stay-behinds could be a threat, however, motion detectors should be used."
- "The stay-behinds then tend to move out of the house into a tent. This might have been the case at IT."
- "But the image to remember is of a few families enjoying a day within the forest steppe - away from the barking dogs, the smelly rubbish heaps, the grumpy stay-behinds of their village."
- "a. 2000, Sam Halpern, Quoted in 2000, James Srodes, Allen Dulles: Master of Spies, page 545, Bobby Kennedy believed the Mafia had lots of interests in and people in Cuba; he was absolutely convinced that they had left stay-behinds in Cuba and all they had to do was tap into those stay-behinds."
- "Diem chose instead to use his military forces and police to capture and kill the Viet Minh “stay-behinds,” even though these actually posed little or no threat to the country, since a good share of them were simply not Communists and those that had been had either recanted in favor of the Diem government or returned to the north."
- "Ganser closely documents activities of “stay-behinds” in 14 western nations — spies and agents with Nazi and Fascist backgrounds, secretly installed by NATO following the Second World War to counter a supposed Soviet threat."