troops vs soldiers

I suspect that Austin is right, but that if you ask the military, they will reverse the order, saying that troops is preferred because a soldier is a fighter and there are so many more things the military personnel do, like manage all the non-military personnel. Perhaps the military wouldn't even acknowledge the first argument, that there is less of an emotional connection to sending troops then soldiers. Of course, I bet if we scan the headlines, we only hear about soldiers dying. The news media don't mind tugging the heart strings.

Wait a minute. I have to take issue with the fallacious question itself. It asserts facts that are simply incorrect.

First, dictionary.com says that the word "troops" DOES mean "soldiers". There are a whopping 23 different definitions from four sources, many of which include "soldiers" or "group of soldiers".

Second, this did not come about in "the last few years". This usage has been common since before any of us were even born.

That being said, it is still an interesting question. Reference to a specific number of troops, like "50,000 troops were sent" was publicly and commonly used in the media at least as early as the Vietnam War. Within the military, such usage was widespread during the Korean War, possibly earlier.

Troops was used more abstractly to mean a body of soldiers, (and, duh, NOT meaning a group of groups of soldiers!) by Roosevelt in World War II, and even by George Washington before the Revolutionary War.

"Troops", technically (if debatably) might have meant group of troops, but in usage, has really been referring to a collective group of soldiers or servicepersons, at least for the last few hundreds of years.

see:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003879.html

In military terms, 'soldiers' tends to denote members of the ground forces, i.e. the army. Troops is more encompassing in that it can include Air Force and Navy personnel as well as others.

As Barbara in the first post pointed out, a 'troop' can also be used as a military unit. In the British Army, units such as the Cavalry and those units that are historically derived from the cavalry (such as the Royal Corps of Signals) use the term Troop in place of Platoon, Squadron in place of Company and Regiment in place of Battalion. Just to make it more confusing, an infantry battalion is the sub-ordinate unit of an infantry regiment (as in 'The First Battalion, The Parachute Regiment'). The British infantry can also use the term 'regiment' for a battalion-sized organisation. These regiments are, in reality, single battalion regiments.

That's what history does for you :-)

Something that drives me up the wall are references to '15 personnel'...

This fits the neo-con pattern of substituting Prussian sounding words for the usual latinate ones. Homeland (heimat) for country is another.

What about "we employ 10 staff". I think this is similar to saying we are sending 10.000 troops to Iraq.

doesnt troop come from trooper? i saw somewhere online that cavalry soldiers of private rank are called troopers. ive heard thats where it came from.. just a thought..

I think the question of modern usage has been solidly answered by at least 3 members of the U.S. military. As for etymology, I have read that "troop" is related to the word "trap," the implication being that the word "troop" refers to a group of people and that if you happen upon a group of people when you are alone, they will jump you (we're talking about 5th or 6th century England here). Does anyone know about that? Is it true?

PS. Regarding the Marines thinking that "Soldier" is demeaning, all who serve should consider themselves Soldiers, as in "Onward Christian Soldiers...Marching on to War"! I have never served, and regret that decision every day!
Thanks for reading my post!
Steve

Yeah...so..troop. Is it etymologically related to trap like I've been told, or..what.

I thank God I have never been ordered into harms way by a war criminal president or killed anyone who has never harmed me or mine. This is semantics. Bush has ordered soldiers, sailors, marines, airmen, and troops, along with their corporate support staff who are not "troops" into harms way. They are all involved in an illegal, unprovoked, invasion, and occupation to invade, kill, steal, and lie about it. Get over the semantics and vote your elected officials out of office. America has been hijacked and we sit around arguing about trivia. That is not the American way.

Just came upon this. I currently serve in the US Marine Corps. The term troop, in their definition simply means on military member (ie. 10,000 troops =10,000 military personnel). They use the term troop, like many others have said, to generalize all the branches of military (said as "catch-all"). The reason for this, again as previously stated, is that not everyone out there is a "soldier". Marines are Marines, Army is Soldier, Navy is Sailor and Air Force is Airman. Now, touching on what Mad Joe said, while calling a Marine a Soldier is the not the best thing to do, it generally (speaking of the majority of us who have good sense) won't start a fight as said before, but if whether you're a civilian or not expect an instant correction and possibly brief explanation of why. Me personally, I have nothing against any of the branches, may God bring all our people back home safely--Semper Fidelis.

Frank, the use of "they" and "their" with a singular antecedent is not a mistake. It's been part of English for 500 years.

Today (04/08/08) General Petraeus,before the US Senate, is referring to US soldiers as "troopers". What's that all about?

Actually, Klaus, that was NOT the original question. The original question ALREADY assumed that the word 'troops' in your context means individual soldiers, not groups. the original question only asked why.

Thanks Anonymous

now to another question
140.000 US troops in iraq and 1.250.000 civilian causalties in iraq.

2.819 people killed in 9/11 but 4144 American deaths in Iraq since war began

clinton almost impeached for lying about his sex life - Bush lying to the UN and reelected.

BTW are french fries still banned?

In the Marine Corps it is as follows: e-1 through e-3 is considered a troop e-4 and e-5 are Non-Commissioned Officers and above that in the enlisted side are Staff Non-Commissioned Officers. So when I say "get me 5 troops immediately", I am speaking of the junior Marines. Soldier is Army, and Marines do not take to being called that very well. It is just the way it is.

Troops is a lot of soldiersss
and soldiers are less people then troops

Well this is still quite confusing. The only military people who responded to this board have all said that a "troop" can be singular. Everyone else has had mixed opinions. I am still confused, but if our own military people say that it can be singuar, then it must be so- they would know, you know?

I wanted to add that although the military people say that "troop" is singular, our dictionaries say that it is a plural word- now I am back to being confused again.

THE ANSWER.

I am an AMERICAN SOLDIER in THE US ARMY....

the army has soldiers.
the air force has airmen
the marine corps has marines
the navy has homosexuals

when it is a joint force we are called troops..

you will never hear a Captain in the Army refer to his soldiers as troops...we are SOLDIERS past and present who live by the SOLDIERS CREED and our WARRIOR ethos.

Well, JC, you've apparently been well and truly brainwashed. Even bought into the rivalry with the Navy tactic they use to increase solidarity.
Anyway, I agree with whoever else has said that, for now, "troop" means a group of soldiers, and "troops" means groups of soldiers. However, if common usage dictates that a "troop" means a single soldier, then the purists will just have to whine about the degradation of the language as it gets added into the dictionaries.

Bah, correction/clarification:
I agree with whomever else said it; “troop” means a group of soldiers, and “troops” means groups of soldiers, for now.

And these are journalism majors that presumably took English in college! It's no ones fault except the talking heads refusal to actually learn proper grammar.

The thing everyone appears to be overlooking is that the word army is a generic word to describe a group of soldiers or military people. It's been that way for centuries.

Now the entire preference of what you want to be called does not override fact. And the fact is that anyone who goes to war is a soldier. Here's a great example of why: we're all humans but we each break down into men and women and then there's children, teens, adults and seniors.

Now in the Navy, an aviator gets upset if he's called a sailor because he's a pilot. A Navy Seal is not a sailor either, he prefers Navy Seal. Army Rangers prefer Ranger over soldier. But if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If you signed up in the military, you know there's a chance you might go to war. Soldiers fight no matter what service they're from. Soldier IS a generic term and always has been.

I've never before in my military career heard the term 'troop' used in defining military members I've been around. But a troop IS a group of soldiers. So if you're okay with the word 'troop' or 'troops' being used, then you must be okay with 'soldier' being used.

Our preference does not change fact or the dictionary.

troops also encompasses privateers. Every time we have pulled out troops we have sent an equal number of private security forces in like XE. BY securing funds for troops rather than soldiers, you are agreeing to keep paying for mercenaries.

As a former Armored Cavalry TROOP Commander, allow me to clarify the difference between the terms Troop, Trooper and Troops.

1) Troop: When referring to an Army company sized unit, a Cavalry unit is traditionally referred to as a "Cavalry Troop" (such as A Troop or C Troop, NOT A Company or C Company). Field Artillery and Air Defense Artillery is organized into "Batteries" - all other Army branches are generally organized into "Companies".
2) Trooper: Trooper is an older term of rank used in Cavalry organizations to refer to Cavalry enlisted men in the ranks of Private through Specialist. It is not an "official" rank, but is used more as a term of respect in today's Cavalry and Parachute Infantry organizations to demonstrate the more elite status of the Cavalry or Airborne Soldier versus his peers in less demanding specialties. It is used more in the generic (as in "How many Troopers do you have fit for duty?") than the specific ("Is Trooper Smith fit for duty?").
3. Troops. Troops is a generic, inoffensive catch all term used to refer to military personnel by those not in the military. It encompasses all branches of the service, and is a verbal shorthand for listing total military strength without having to break down the end strength by individual service. For example, it is easier to say "There are 200,000 troops in the Afghanistan Theater of Operations" versus "There are 150,000 Soldiers, 40,000 Marines, 8000 airmen and 2000 sailors in the Afghanistan Theater of Operations.

I am absolutely positive in my mind that the media uses the word "troops" in place of "soldiers" because "troops" sound less human than "soldiers". When x number of troops are shot to death, it sounds better than x number of soldiers were shot to death. It's a sick psychological game. "Troops" sound more like objects, whereas "soldiers" obviously paints the image of an actual person in peoples' minds. Our evil government couldn't care less that they are sending our young people all of the world to be slaughtered in all these useless wars. They only care about their greed and power. :-|

It is used so we don't know how Many men were lost when published, when sent in Troops sounds like Men not a man, when deaths are tallied Troops becomes a soldier, It's very confusing, just like Allies, when that is used you have to know witch country is saying the statement, to England were the Allies, to the US, England is the Allies, Makes Allies sound like the enemy, So much for Learning the Facts, it's what happens when multi cultures are mixed, You get stupefied to say the least....

It is used so we don't know how Many men were lost when published, when sent in Troops sounds like Men not a man, when deaths are tallied Troops becomes a soldier, It's very confusing, just like Allies, when that is used you have to know witch country is saying the statement, to England were the Allies, to the US, England is the Allies, Makes Allies sound like the enemy, So much for Learning the Facts, it's what happens when multi cultures are mixed, You get stupefied to say the least....

Another term that gets misused to mean a single person is 'cohort' which is a tenth of a legion or, more generally, any group of soldiers.

Skeeter, that's very interesting and informative. I was not aware that cohort could also be a group. But, I must take issue with your part of your comment. Referring to a single person as a cohort is not misuse. Claiming so does not even qualify as prescriptivism; it is simply an etymological fallacy.

Emil I am, therefore I am not Skeeter, your coequal is not in your verbosity, though your rebuke is exactly comparable to the ineffectual transfer of mitochondrial me-curium you are in possession of, of corse you mistakenly cast ambiguously towards my person, it has to be beguiling of who you Think you are... No offense taken though I am emotionally unavailable for this period, till I wait the Oedipus? Remember your Henry Higgins on this billboard ... Emil M

re: cohort. This is from Oxford Dictionaries Online:

They give three meanings: the first is the one given by Skeeter Lewis.

cohort - 2.[treated as singular or plural] a group of people with a shared characteristic or a common statistical characteristic:
"a cohort of civil servants patiently drafting legislation"
"the 1940-4 birth cohort of women"

cohort - 3. often derogatory - a supporter or companion:
"young Jack arrived with three of his cohorts"
"a long-time cohort of the band"

@Emil E or M,

I don't think anyone here would care if you were single or not because we, the regulars here—Warsaw Will, AnWulf, Jayles, Hairy Scot, porsche, Skeeter Lewis, Dyske, myself, and others—that is, would not like a vain, supercilious, pretentious, bombastic (or grandiloquent, magniloquent, or orotund if those are more suitable) partner who can barely write a complete sentence, which treads over itself, i.e. a run-on sentence, competently and without verbose garbage and who patronized porsche for addressing Skeeter Lewis and not you. This I confirmed, for Skeeter was the first to use "cohort" on this page.Maybe you should reflect on "who you Think you are" before replying with such condescension. Also verbosity is not equivalent to vocabulary, lexicon, or, for those Anglishers, wordstock. Stop using a thesaurus, learn the definitions of words properly.

Remember your respect on the board.

Good day.

It's true that some descriptivist dictionaries list the wrong use of cohort. But then, to misquote Mandy Rice Davies, they would, wouldn't they?

@Skeeter Lewis - "some descriptivist dictionaries" - Could you perhaps name a dictionary that isn't descriptivist.The OED, for example, never set out to be anything else. Even the American Heritage Dictionary, which set up in opposition to the allegedly free-and-easy Webster's Third edition, is basically descriptive, with its user panels.

Incidentally, the group of soldiers meaning seems to have predated the tenth of a legion meaning (Online Etymology).

The overwhelming use of cohort today has nothing to do either with the military or with sidekicks, but with statistical analysis and social science. Out of 360 instances of cohort at the British National Corpus, 97 are 'a cohort of' (only one of which appears to have a military connection), 11 are 'age cohort', 29 'birth cohort' and 29 are 'cohort study':

http://www.just-the-word.com/show_examples.pl?triple=cohort_N+pmod+of_PREP

See also examples at the Economist:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=cohort%20site:www.economist.com

The use you don't like seems to have started in the States in the 1940s/50s, including several outings in the linguistically rather fussy New Yorker, one being by JD Salinger (who seems to have had a bit of stick for starting the fashion). The Times Literary Supplement of Nov 1965 is on your side, calling it "the new American vulgarism of 'cohort' meaning 'partner' " (from MWDEU). But it seems pretty commonplace nowadays, and in a Usage Note at the (nominally conservative) American Heritage Dictionary they say:

"Seventy-one percent of the Usage Panel accepts the sentence 'The cashiered dictator and his cohorts have all written their memoirs', while only 43 percent accepts 'The gangster walked into the room surrounded by his cohort'."

You can read about 'cohort' in the Merriam-Webster New Book of Word Histories at Google Books: http://books.google.pl/books?id=IrcZEZ1bOJsC&pg=PA114

and in The American Heritage Book of English Usage, also at Google Books:
http://books.google.pl/books?id=BEHFyMCdwssC&pg=PA81

I can't help thinking that cohort is in a class with decimated.

Decimated! Quite. An other one is 'fortuitous' which, some years ago, started to be misused for 'fortunate'. Originally, it meant 'accidental', pure and simple. A death could be 'fortuitous'. It didn't mean you were happy about it.
Some dictionaries cover their behinds nowadays by saying it means 'fortunately accidental', rather like 'serendipitous'.

Incidentally, Will, the social sciences have a lot to answer for linguistically.

Porsche, I don't think my strictures about 'cohort' can be called an etymological fallacy since, as my research assistant Warsaw Will has pointed out, as recently as 1965 it was described as 'an American vulgarism'.

@Skeeter Lewis - 'the social sciences have a lot to answer for linguistically' - Oh, dear! Mind you they've brought the word cohort out of the military scholarship closet: judging by Ngram, the use of cohort in books has more than quadrupled since 1960.

I was joking about 'decimate'. You don't seriously think it should be reserved for the disciplinary killing of every tenth member of a military group, do you? A use there's not much call for nowadays, and which hardly anyone uses.

Sorry, but it's the speakers of a language as a whole who decide on the meanings of words, not etymology or a few language mavens. And I welcome that - a kind of representative democracy rather than autocracy.

If we took etymology as our only guide, we could never say it was a terrible film or a terrific film unless we were terrified or an awful film unless we were struck with awe.

As for fortuitous, 'some years ago' turns out to be at least nearly ninety years ago, as Fowler was commenting on it in 1926. Although it is indeed sometimes used instead of fortunate, its most common use seems to be rather a combination of accidental and fortunate, as in this from James Thurber:

"... I was saved in college one night by the fortuitous appearance in the night skies of the most brilliant aurora borealis seen in Ohio since the Civil War" (MWDEU)

Lots of words in English have multiple meanings, and just because words take on new meanings doesn't mean they can't be used in their original meanings or that the original meaning are somehow diluted. Context will tell us which applies. When I hear that Cromwell decimated certain of his units, I know what is meant, just as I know that soldiers being decimated in battle means something else. The same goes for troops and cohorts.

On the subject of troops: its use as a synonym for soldiers or armed forces in general, and not simply meaning a cavalry unit of a particular size, is the first meaning given at Oxford Online, and goes back to the sixteenth century:

"They were supposed by their imprecations to destroy kings with all their troops." - 1545

"They make frequent sallies, and beyond all expectation defeat Maurice's troops." - 1547

Examples with numbers can be found from the seventeenth century:

"The soldiers say it means ruin and the population cannot support such large forces shut up inside the walled towns, especially in Antwerp where there are one-thousand- eight-hundred troops instead of the usual garrison of five hundred." - 1607

"Colonel Nicolls had three hundred troops under his command, with four frigates, for the reduction of the Dutch at Manhattan" - 1669

"A force of about a thousand troops was raised and sent into Rhode Island" -1676

" a row of stone barracks, not inelegantly built, sufficient to contain sixteen hundred or two thousand troops" - 1700

"Commodore Hood then took possession of the fort, and landed several thousand troops, which had been sent by the Pacha of Rhodes" - 1700

"he conferred the command of the ten thousand troops destined for Holland on the earl of Marlborough" - Smollett, 1800

Troops to mean soldiers is as old as the hills, and I find all this talk of it being euphemistic, in the way of 'collateral damage', so much nonsense, just as insisting it can only be used for a cavalry group commanded by a captain, or whatever.

'Fortuitous' in the sense of 'accidental' was the usual meaning until the Seventies or Eighties in Britain and still is among the educated. But I never tell other people how to use the language. My rules are for myself. I permit myself to comment, however, on a site such as this.

As for 'decimate', if I didn't use it to mean 'to reduce by one tenth' I wouldn't use it at all. Others are free to use it in any sense they wish.

Ah, the seventies and eighties! That's when the rot set in. I think they've probably been saying that every century since Dr Lowth started laying down the law. Whether I'm one of 'the educated', or simply a member of (the) hoi polloi, I don't know, as I don't have much need for words like decimated or fortuitous.

And surely to a purist, decimate doesn't simply mean 'reduce by a tenth' but refers to a very specific form of military punishment, derived from the Romans, but practised in the Parliamentary army to deal with mutinies. Incidentally, its use in English to mean 'destroy large numbers' seems to have be almost as old as the punishment meaning (both 17th century).

The Bush administration (George W.) asked (probably not the right word) the U.S. press to refer to
our soldiers (generic) as troops, in an effort to dehumanize their deaths (under his command). And like the sheep they are, they capitulated. And like the sheep we are, we didn't object.

I believe the media uses the word Troops for drama effect. I picked that up during the first Gulf War -- I felt is was incorrect, but for media propaganda it was easy to get away with. I knew what they were doing from the very early reports of the war; when they had their first reports of U.S. casualties. They would say or write something like "..several troops have been reported killed or wounded.."

I remember sitting their thinking "several troops??!! man their wiping us out what's going on?" come to find out it is 1 soldier killed and 3 others wounded. Of course just 1 lost life is terrible, that is bad enough, but when you use the word Troops in place of Solider it delivers real drama to the effect.

It goes back to the old headline attention game.

I still cant stand to the media's use of the word, to me its not right.

"a great number of the troops were killed and wounded"
"The militia hung upon their rear; and many of the regular troops were killed and wounded."
"in which many of the provincials, and more of the regular troops were killed and wounded"
"About two thousand of the British troops were killed ..."
" In this assault about 60 of our troops were killed"
"and great numbers of the American troops were killed or taken ..."

These all come from American books. And they are all from the first half of the nineteenth century! In fact, judging by Ngram, the expression "troops were killed" appears less frequently in twenty-first century books than in early nineteenth century ones. On the other hand, the use of "soldiers were killed" (in those books included at Ngram) increased at about double the rate of "troops were killed" during the 2000s.

This does not cover media use, of course, but it does show that the use of the word "troops" to mean "soldiers", rather than a specific group of soldiers, is nothing new, and while I can see that "collateral damage"really is a euphemism, I can't really see how "troops" would be seen as a euphemism for "soldiers", anymore than "soldiers" is a euphemism for "men".

I wonder if there's any proof Bush asked the US media to use "troops" instead of "soldiers", or whether this is just another of those internet myths. And I also wonder how real this perceived change actually is.

At the NYT, a site search brings up 108 hits for "soldiers were killed in Iraq" as opposed to 56 for "troops were killed in Iraq". At CNN, it's 89 for soldiers, 49 for troops. At Fox News, which might have been expected to be more sympathetic to Bush's alleged request, it's 68 for soldiers as opposed to 36 for troops, and at the New York Post, it's 14 to 10. Hardly overwhelming evidence.

http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=troops+were+killed%2Csoldiers+were+killed&year_start=1800&year_end=2008&corpus=17&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Ctroops%20were%20killed%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Csoldiers%20were%20killed%3B%2Cc0

I agree with the original poster to the extent that a number should not come directly before the plural form, "troops." If you can't say 1 troop, meaning one person in the armed forces, then you can't say 4 troops, meaning 4 people in the armed forces. This was a recent editorial decision with only some of the news agencies, and one that I do not agree with.

We should not say, "4 troops were killed" in any case. It may be true that a Marine or a soldier would want "troops" replaced by "Marines" or "soldiers," and saying 1 Marine and 1 soldier is grammatically possible in English.

A possible compromise might be "4 of our troops were killed," which sort of skirts the grammar issue by picking individuals out of a group using the word "of," as in the examples given in the previous post by Warsaw Will. 4 of our flock, 4 of our team, 4 0f our pride (or lions) are all possible even though the group word cannot mean one individual.

A "troop" more 3 or more soldiers.

They're not synonymous. A troop is a company of armor, cavalry or recon platoons or detachments; its plural is troops. Troops, a collective noun, are also members of an armed/fighting force. Via reverse etymological derivation, as a root of troops, troop has also come to mean one member of such a military unit. Soldier has many connotations/denotations. US marines were once "sea soldiers;" Salvation Army members were called soldiers; enforcers (e.g., onorata societa) have been called "foot soldiers." Foot soldiers for Rome were called in Latin "infantry," as they were so close to the emperor as to be considered his children. German WWII paratroopers, Fallschirmtruppen, in the strictest sense weren't soldiers, because they were part of the Luftwaffe (air force): but, of course, they were troops. Imho, Lou K., Mil/intel historian, MS, Wayne State U.

I think it's kind of misleading on purpose when someone calls them troops. No one wants to hear 10,000 men going to war that's too individualized, too hard on the parents. They call them troops to make it sound let's gruesome so they can get away with sending more men to war

They use “troops” because It is a generic term for members of all services. The word “soldier” refers _only_ to Army personnel, and their may be personnel from the other branches there as well. Air Force personnel are only called “airman”, regardless of gender. Navy and Coast Guard personnel are “seaman”, again, regardless of gender. Marines personnel are only referred to as “Marine“. (You _really_ don’t want to get that one wrong.)

A group of personnel from more than one branch of service can be called “servicemen”, service members” or “troops”