colonel

[kur-nl]

noun

1. an officer in the U.S. Army, Air Force, or Marine Corps ranking between lieutenant colonel and brigadier general: corresponding to a captain in the U.S. Navy.

2. a commissioned officer of similar rank in the armed forces of some other nations.

3. an honorary title bestowed by some Southern states, as to those who have brought honor to the state, prominent businesspersons, visiting celebrities, or the like.

   When the vice president visited the state he was made a Kentucky colonel.

4. Older Use.,  (in the South) a title of respect prefixed to the name of distinguished elderly men.

colonel

/ ˈkɜːnəl /

noun

1. an officer of land or air forces junior to a brigadier but senior to a lieutenant colonel

Pronunciation Note

Colonel , with its medial l pronounced as , illustrates one source for the apparent vagaries of English spelling: divergence between a word's orthographic development and its established pronunciation. In this case, English borrowed from French two variant forms of the same word, one pronounced with medial and final , and a second reflecting dissimilation of the first to . After a period of competition, the dissimilated form triumphed in pronunciation, while the spelling colonel became the orthographic standard.

Other Word Forms

• colonelcy noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of colonel¹

1540–50; < Middle French < Italian colon(n)ello, equivalent to colonn(a) column + -ello < Latin -ellus diminutive suffix; so named because such an officer originally headed the first column or company of a regiment

Word History and Origins

Origin of colonel¹

C16: via Old French, from Old Italian colonnello column of soldiers, from colonna _column

Example Sentences

“There’s priority and money,” said Mark Cancian, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and a retired Marine colonel.

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Others say that one of his grandfathers was a White army colonel and one of his grandmothers was an enslaved Colored woman whom the colonel had forced himself on.

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He was executed the following year, and the war ground on for another decade until Agustín de Iturbide, a royalist colonel, switched allegiances and led the rebel factions to independence.

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Penkovsky, a colonel in Soviet military intelligence, was offering to share the Soviet Union’s most guarded military secrets with the Americans and the British.

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Intelligence operatives working with Cuban counterintelligence agents reward those who betray conspirators with jobs, money, cars and even homes, said Edward Rodríguez, a former army colonel who fled Venezuela and lives in exile.

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