regiment
Americannoun
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Military. a unit of ground forces, consisting of two or more battalions or battle groups, a headquarters unit, and certain supporting units.
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Obsolete. government.
verb (used with object)
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to manage or treat in a rigid, uniform manner; subject to strict discipline.
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to form into a regiment or regiments.
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to assign to a regiment or group.
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to form into an organized group, usually for the purpose of rigid or complete control.
noun
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a military formation varying in size from a battalion to a number of battalions
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a large number in regular or organized groups
regiments of beer bottles
verb
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to force discipline or order on, esp in a domineering manner
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to organize into a regiment or regiments
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to form into organized groups
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to assign to a regiment
Other Word Forms
Derived Forms
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regimentationnoun
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overregimentverb (used with object)
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nonregimentedadjective
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regimentaladjective
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unregimentedadjective
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regimentallyadverb
Inflected Forms
Nouns
Participles
Conjugated Forms
Present
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regimentsimple
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regimentssimple
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have regimentedperfect
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has regimentedperfect
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am regimentingprogressive
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are regimentingprogressive
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is regimentingprogressive
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have been regimentingperfect progressive
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has been regimentingperfect progressive
Past
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regimentedsimple
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had regimentedperfect
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was regimentingprogressive
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were regimentingprogressive
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had been regimentingperfect progressive
Future
Etymology
Origin of regiment
1350–1400; Middle English < Middle French < Late Latin regimentum, equivalent to Latin reg ( ere ) to rule + -i- -i- + -mentum -ment
Explanation
Use the word regiment to describe a military unit that is smaller than a division: “Geoff’s new regiment consisted of three battalions that had been based in Alabama.” Most often used as a noun to describe a military unit made up of several battalions, the word regiment can also be used as a verb. If you ever need to assign troops to a regiment, you might say something like, “Next week I will regiment the ground forces arriving from North Dakota.” The verb form can also be used in a more general sense to describe any action that is characterized by strict order or control: "Her diet is strictly regimented to include only Sugar Babies."
Vocabulary lists containing regiment
Chains
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The American Revolution - Introductory
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"There Will Come Soft Rains" by Ray Bradbury
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Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
See Examples For:
The move could take years and would be costly since new infrastructure would likely be needed for the regiment.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 15, 2026
Restaurant owners here, whose business suffers whenever the regiment is mobilized for exercises, fear they won’t survive a permanent withdrawal of troops.
From The Wall Street Journal ● May 13, 2026
Rapamycin is a widely available immunosuppressant drug traditionally used as an anti-rejection regiment for organ transplant patients.
From Science Daily ● Feb. 28, 2026
Zhang joined the army at the age of 18 and moved up the ranks in a regiment headquartered in southwestern Yunnan province, which borders Myanmar, Laos and Vietnam.
From Barron's ● Feb. 4, 2026
He’d been arrested earlier that year while in charge of another air force regiment, for endangering the life of a top government official by failing to fly with him through a dust storm.
From "A Thousand Sisters" by Elizabeth Wein
The relief depicts an actual event: Shaw, scion of a prominent abolitionist family, is on horseback leading one of the conflict’s first black regiments off to the front.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Jul. 2, 2026
A tally of once-common British birds, Mr. Nicolson writes, “reads like a list of regiments decimated in battle.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 5, 2025
Shoulder badges indicated that the remains could include soldiers who had fought for two Scottish regiments - the Gordon Highlanders and the Cameron Highlanders.
From BBC ● Sep. 26, 2025
The pipers' tunes were used to identify different regiments.
From BBC ● Mar. 14, 2025
There were three regiments, whose march in time to a galley drum made the earth tremble.
From "One Hundred Years of Solitude" by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“They are very disciplined and regimented about when they stop using it.”
From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 18, 2025
But the format is similar to that of other immersive shows, although here it is necessarily more regimented.
From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 9, 2025
The walls of these rooms accomplish a kind of muting of her aura, a place where veneration feels austere or regimented by bureaucracy.
From Los Angeles Times ● Apr. 29, 2025
It is why detached observers are led to the conclusion City's football is regimented.
From BBC ● Apr. 22, 2025
As an Army cook, he’d learned to live a strictly regimented routine.
From "While the World Watched: A Birmingham Bombing Survivor Comes of Age during the Civil Rights Movement" by Carolyn Maull McKinstry
When my father was a small boy in Galveston, Texas, with no siblings to play with or anything like a helicopter parent regimenting his time, he roamed the inscrutable world of adults all around him.
From New York Times ● Sep. 22, 2021
He began obsessively working out and regimenting his meals.
From The Guardian ● Jul. 17, 2019
Harrison was the disciplinarian who drummed into Ryan Giggs, Paul Scholes, Nicky Butt, the Neville brothers and everybody else coming through United’s system the importance of regimenting, hard graft and accepting orders.
From The Guardian ● Nov. 8, 2015
In lassoing and regimenting the muse, fiction apps evaporate some of writing’s pain, but also some of its glory.
From Slate ● Oct. 15, 2014
I am not now speaking of the popular idea of regimenting people’s thought; I’m speaking of the implicit, almost unconscious, or pre-conscious, assumptions and ideals upon which whole nations and races act and live.
From "Native Son" by Richard Wright
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
