lost in action
- idiom
- Specialized
:
desaparecido en combate
- Many soldiers are declared lost in action when their bodies are not recovered after a battle.
Examples
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The family held a memorial for their son, who was lost in action during the war.
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He received a letter informing him that his brother was lost in action in a military mission.
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Actually, Officer, the bunny suit was lost in action.
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Of the 17 robots that attended rescue and recovery efforts, eight deployed at Ground Zero, and one was lost in action.
Academic text (2001)
Synonyms
7
7.4
A person people cannot find whose location is unknown
Antonyms
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'lost' (cannot be found) combined with 'in action' (during combat operations) yields 'missing during military engagement,' which maps onto the given definition. This structure and sense are cross-linguistically common and follow straightforward English prepositional phrase composition, so a B1 learner who knows the constituent words would readily infer the meaning.
Etymology
The phrase lost in action comes from old military reports. If a soldier could not be found during the fighting, the action, they were listed as lost because no one knew what had happened to them. So today lost in action means a military person is 'missing and unaccounted for'.