personnel casualty
- noun
- /ˈpɜrsəˌnɛl ˈkæʒuəlti/
- Specialized
:
baja de personal
- The military reported significant personnel casualties during the battle, with many soldiers either killed or taken prisoner.
Examples
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Not only were there horrendous personnel casualties because of the Civil War, including the virtual wipe-out of an entire cohort of young men from the U.S. population, the repercussions of this war continue to plague our country.
Blog text (1) -
In the urgent briefing, the general outlined the details of the personnel casualties that occurred during the recent operation.
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After the conflict, the government issued a statement acknowledging the personnel casualties suffered by their forces.
Synonyms
40
6.1
Loss of soldiers and equipment in war or training
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'personnel' (staff or people employed) combined with 'casualty' (an individual killed, injured, or missing) yields 'a member of the personnel who is a casualty.' Although it is military/technical register, the sense follows normal noun–noun composition and has clear cross‑linguistic parallels, so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer the meaning.
Etymology
Personnel casualty joins the words personnel, meaning the people in a unit, and casualty, meaning someone lost in a fight. Imagine an officer marking names on a list after a battle; those marked are the 'personnel casualties' who were killed or captured by the enemy, so the term means a military member lost by death or capture.