dragoon

1 of 2

noun

dra·​goon drə-ˈgün 

dra-

1

: a member of a European military unit formerly composed of heavily armed mounted troops

2

: cavalryman

Illustration of dragoon

• dragoon 1

dragoon

2 of 2

verb

dragooned; dragooning; dragoons

transitive verb

1

: to subjugate or persecute by harsh use of troops

2

: to force into submission or compliance especially by violent measures

Did you know?

A dragoon was a mounted European infantryman of the 17th and 18th centuries armed with a firearm called by the same name. We suspect no arm-twisting is necessary to convince you that the firearm's name, which came to English from French, comes from the fired weapon's resemblance to a fire-breathing dragon. History has recorded the dragonish nature of the dragoons who persecuted the French Protestants in the 17th century during the reign of Louis XIV. The persecution by means of dragoons eventually led to the use of the word dragoon as a verb.

Synonyms

Verb

• force
• compel
• coerce
• oblige

Examples of dragoon in a Sentence

Verb

she was dragooned into agreeing to the fraudulent scheme

Recent Examples on the Web

Noun

At the Battle of White Plains on October 28, 1776, General George Washington’s soldiers were forced to retreat following an attack from a small contingent of British dragoons. —Andrew Paul, Popular Science, 9 July 2025

Burgoyne returned to duty as an aging dragoon captain, just in time to win fame at the cannon's mouth in the Seven Years' War, notably in Normandy and Brittany against the French, and on the Tagus River near Lisbon against the Spanish. —/ Cbs News, CBS News, 13 June 2025

Verb

Turning parts of the military into Trump’s domestic security force would dragoon Democrats, independents and Republicans into a MAGA campaign that many would find grotesque. —David French, Mercury News, 20 Aug. 2025

The terrorist group has dragooned its hostages, Jewish and not, into perverse performance art. —Yair Rosenberg, The Atlantic, 25 Feb. 2025

Word History

Etymology

Noun

borrowed from French dragon "dragon, military standard, kind of cavalry soldier," going back to Old French, "dragon, military standard" — more at dragon

Note: The French word in reference to a cavalry soldier is apparently first attested in La Satyre Ménippée de la vertu du Catholicon d'Espagne, a political satire attacking the Catholic League and the pretensions of the Spanish monarchy, written by an authorial collective and first printed in 1594. The Oxford English Dictionary, first edition, acknowledges that the word is borrowed from French, but then seems to contradict itself by treating the sense "cavalry soldier" as derivative of a contemporaneous sense "short-barreled firearm." There appears to be no evidence of the latter use for French dragon. Note that the ending -oon [u:n] is a frequent outcome in English of French -on [ɔ͂], as well as Spanish -ón and Italian -one, in words borrowed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Early evidence for dragoon in English is in Francis Markham's Five Decades of Epistles of Warre (London, 1622). Markham uses both the firearm and cavalryman senses without explicitly linking them and at times simultaneously, as in "… a Lieutenant of a Troupe of compleat armed French Pistoliers, is reputed better in degree then a Captaine of an hundred Foot, a Lieutenant of the late inuented Dragoones (being not aboue sixteene inche Barrell, and full Musquet bore) the Foot-Captaines equall …" (pp. 137-38). (He uses carbine in the same manner, for both the weapon and the soldier carrying it.) This might suggest that the weapon was named after the soldier, despite the Oxford dictionary's note that the firearm was "so called from its 'breathing fire' like the fabulous dragon."

Verb

derivative of dragoon entry 1

First Known Use

Noun

1604, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Verb

1689, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Phrases Containing dragoon

• dragoon into

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Kids Definition

dragoon

1 of 2 noun

dra·​goon drə-ˈgün 

dra-

: a mounted infantry soldier

dragoon

2 of 2 verb

: to get (someone) to do something by force