Casualty: definition | Australian War Memorial (2024)

FAQs

What counts as a casualty in war? ›

In military usage, a casualty is a person in service killed in action, killed by disease, diseased, disabled by injuries, disabled by psychological trauma, captured, deserted, or missing, but not someone who sustains injuries which do not prevent them from fighting.

In wartime, you'll hear the word casualty used often for someone killed or injured. But casualty can also refer to deaths or injuries suffered in an accident or some other unfortunate event.

American Civil War casualties are those soldiers, both Union and Confederate, who died, were wounded, went missing or were captured. The American Civil War was the nation's bloodiest war.

[count] : a person who is hurt or killed during an accident, war, etc. The army suffered/took/sustained heavy casualties [=many soldiers were killed or wounded] in the town.

' Fatalities are deaths, whereas casualties are assumed to be injuries or fatalities. As such, if a report only indicates “casualties” (or similar ambiguous wording in other languages), the conservative approach that ACLED takes is to assume all casualties are injuries and hence code 0 fatalities.

Casualty (CAS): Any person lost to his organization be reason of having been declared dead, wounded, injured, diseased, interned, captured, missing; or a person whose whereabouts or status has not been determined, provided it can reasonably be determined he is not in an unauthorized absence status.

CASUALTY Definition & Legal Meaning

Inevitable accident; an event not to lie foreseen or guarded against.

A casualty is a loss resulting from an accident or someone who is hurt, wounded, diseased, detained or dead in an accident. The term casualty means a seriously injured patient. It is predominantly a military word, generally used for service for accidents.

Casualty Category - A term used to specifically classify a casualty for reporting purposes based upon the casualty type and the casualty status. Casualty categories include killed in action (KIA), died of wounds received in action (DWRIA), and wounded in action (WIA).

War. -- In war, truth is the first casualty.

What's another word for casualty of war? ›

A person killed or injured in a war or accident. fatality. victim. loss. dead.

Emergency and casualty are two distinct concepts that are often associated with situations involving sudden or unexpected events.

/ˈkæʒəlti/ , /ˈkæʒuəlti/ (pl. casualties) 1a person who is killed or injured in war or in an accident highway casualties Both sides had suffered heavy casualties (= many people had been killed).

A casualty is a person who is injured or killed in a war or in an accident. Troops fired on the demonstrators causing many casualties. A casualty of a particular event or situation is a person or a thing that has suffered badly as a result of that event or situation.

An acceptable loss, also known as acceptable damage or acceptable casualties, is a military euphemism used to indicate casualties or destruction inflicted by the enemy that is considered minor or tolerable.

Classification of casualty statistics

Military casualty statistics listed here include combat related deaths as well as military deaths caused by accidents, disease and deaths while prisoners of war. Most of the casualties during WWI are due to war related famine and disease.

The casualty data consist of wounded-in-action (WIA) and disease and nonbattle-injury (DNBI) casualty rates expressed as the rate per thousand of the population at risk (PAR) per day. Casualty rate estimation processes vary considerably for WIA and DNBI and are typically estimated using computer software programs.