conscription

noun

con·scrip·tion kən-ˈskrip-shən

Synonyms of conscription next

: compulsory enrollment of persons especially for military service : draft

During the war the armed forces were heavily dependent on conscription.

Did you know?

With its scrip- root, conscription means basically writing someone's name on a list—a list that, unfortunately, a lot of people usually don't want to be on. Conscription has existed at least since ancient Egypt's Old Kingdom (27th century B.C.), though universal conscription has been rare throughout history. Forms of conscription were used by Prussia, Switzerland, Russia, and other European powers in the 17th and 18th centuries. In the U.S., conscription was first applied during the Civil War, by both the North and the South. In the North there were pockets of resistance, and the draft led to riots in several cities. The U.S. abandoned conscription at the end of the war and didn't revive it until World War I.

Examples of conscription in a Sentence

young people who face conscription into the army

Recent Examples on the Web

Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

But an explanatory note to a draft law about fines for failing to register revealed that 6 million Ukrainian nationals of conscription age still had not updated their military registration data within 60 days of the legislation coming into force. —

John Mac Ghlionn, Newsweek, 13 Jan. 2025 Mike Waltz, incoming national security advisor to Donald Trump, has called on Ukraine to lower its conscription age from 26 to 18 to stabilize the frontline in a Jan. 12 interview with ABC News. —

Katya Soldak, Forbes, 13 Jan. 2025 In April, Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law that lowered the military conscription age from 27 to 25 to replenish its depleted ranks. —

Stephen Sorace, Fox News, 28 Nov. 2024 As of late May, an additional 45,000 Rohingya had fled a new surge of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state (40,000 were already in India), including reports of beheadings, mass arson, and forcible conscription into Myanmar’s government forces. —

Rasheed Ahmed, TIME, 29 June 2024 See all Example Sentences for conscription