war [OE] Before the end of the Old English period, when the word was borrowed from French, there was no English word exactly meaning war, nor did any of their Germanic relatives have one despite their warlike reputation. Instead they used words like ‘strife’ or ‘struggle’, but nothing that signified the formal, ruler-based, organized conflict with a standing army implied by the Latin bellum. The word came over from Old French guerre and is related to worse [OE]. Guerre itself is of Germanic origin, and originally meant ‘confusion, discord’.