AMBUSH • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Ambush

Add this Dictionary
to your website!
See more options...

/ˈæmbˌʊʃ/ Listen

noun

Ambush n.

A disposition or arrangement of troops for attacking an enemy unexpectedly from a concealed station. Hence: Unseen peril; a device to entrap; a snare. "Heaven, whose high walls fear no assault or siege Or ambush from the deep."

A concealed station, where troops or enemies lie in wait to attack by surprise. "Bold in close ambush, base in open field."

The troops posted in a concealed place, for attacking by surprise; liers in wait. (Obs.) "The ambush arose quickly out of their place."

To lay an ambush, to post a force in ambush.

verb

Ambush v. t. (past & past part. ambushed; pres. part. ambushing)

To station in ambush with a view to surprise an enemy. "By ambushed men behind their temple laid, We have the king of Mexico betrayed."

To attack by ambush; to waylay.

Ambush v. i. To lie in wait, for the purpose of attacking by surprise; to lurk. "Nor saw the snake that ambushed for his prey."

See images of 'Ambush'

Etymology of 'Ambush'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

Share |

"Ambush" Quotes from Famous Books

... be to wait in ambush behind the trees of the clearing—I mean for Dugald Shaw and Cuthbert Vane to do it—and shoot down the unsuspecting pirates as they returned. This desperate plan, which so unpleasantly resembled murder, cast ...

— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon

... that is to say, left casually open without design or consciousness, from which some careless passer-by, when throwing the most negligent of glances upon the page, has been startled by a solitary word lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting and lurking for him, and looking at him steadily as an eye searching the haunted places of his conscience. These cases are in principle identical with those of the second class, where the inquirer ...

— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey

... to shoot at that boy. The colonel took a stick and marked out on the floor our position at Antietam, and showed where the reserves were supposed to be and how the enemy masked his guns behind that hill, and we planted our artillery on the opposite ridge; and he marched with the infantry and lay in ambush while the enemy came marching in force through the wood. In time Watts McHurdie was talking to Lincoln in the streets of Richmond, and telling for the hundredth time what Lincoln said of the song and how he had sung ...

— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... where the great woods deepen, and the gloomy shadows lie darkly all through the long afternoons, a small party of hideously painted savages skulked silently in ambush. Suddenly to their strained ears was borne the sound of horses' hoofs; and then, all at once, a woman's voice rang out in ...

— Bob Hampton of Placer • Randall Parrish

... through the Day—so through another still— The Day became a Seventh—the Seventh a Moon— The Moon a Year—while they rejoiced together, Thinking their pleasure never was to end. But rolling Heaven whisper'd from his Ambush, "So in my License is it not set down. Ah for the sweet Societies I make At Morning and before the Nightfall break; Ah for the Bliss that with the Setting Sun I mix, and, with ...

— Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Salaman and Absal • Omar Khayyam and Ralph Waldo Emerson

More quotes...