Enfilade and defilade are concepts in military tactics used to describe a military formation's exposure to enemy fire.
Source: tatoeba (7838356)
Enfilade
//ˌɛnfəlˈeɪd//
Synonyms for "enfilade" (31 found)
Ranked by relevance and common usage.
Closest matches (7)
Strong matches (9)
Noun(2 words)
Verb(1 words)
Related words (15)
Related word relations
OpenGloss and ConceptNet supply richer edges like generalizations, collocations, and derivations.
More general
3 entriesSynonyms
3 entriesderived
1 entrieshas context
1 entriesis a
1 entriesmanner of
1 entriesrelated to
10 entriesTranslations
15 translations across 5 languages.
Chinese Mandarin
1 entries- 縱射 /纵射 noun (gunfire)
German
4 entries- Bauflucht noun (passage)
- Enfilade noun (architecture)
- Fensterflucht noun (passage)
- Flucht noun (passage)
Irish
1 entries- lámhach leatrasna noun (gunfire)
Japanese
1 entries- 縦射 noun (gunfire)
Polish
2 entries- amfilada noun (gunfire)
- amfilada noun (architecture)
Sample sentences
11 total sentences available.
In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about people who know their world history as being able to look back through the millennia as an enfilade of rooms: Greece yields to Rome; Rome to the Byzantine Empire ... the Renaissance ... the British Empire ... America ... China. The same goes for people who can recite their kings and queens. British history clicks into a long enfilade of discrete, identifiable periods.
Source: wiktionary
Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I.
Source: wiktionary
In minutes they had gained the top, fell prone, and began to pour deadly repeater-fire into the enemy below while their compatriots raked the top of the coulee with an enfilade.
Source: wiktionary
Showing 4 of 11 available sentences.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.