countermove

noun

coun·​ter·​move ˈkau̇n-tər-ˌmüv 

variants or counter-move

plural countermoves or counter-moves

: a move designed to check, offset, or counter another move

Chess-playing programs, for instance, were … instructed to look ahead and try to calculate all possible moves and countermoves.

—Tom Alexander

… had seen … a linebacker drift out and line up nose to nose on a wide receiver. It surprised them, and they had come up with a countermove.

—Mark Bowden

… wanted to play out the long-term implications of possible U.S. moves and Iranian countermoves.

—James Fallows

"Their kidnapping of Miss Tuppence is the counter-move to your escape."

—Agatha Christie

Example Sentences

Recent Examples on the Web

Secondly, at a time when most defenses spend most of their time in nickel packages, handing it off into a light box is a logical countermove. —Nate Davis, USA TODAY, 13 Sep. 2020

The only suitable countermove, ostensibly, is to raise the retirement age to pare back the years that the average retiree will be collecting benefits. —Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 2 Feb. 2023

Yet the obvious countermove, placing Ukraine under an American nuclear umbrella, risks the greatest nuclear crisis since John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev squared off over Cuba in October 1962. —Walter Russell Mead, WSJ, 12 Sep. 2022

American troops are heading to Eastern Europe in the latest countermove by the U.S. to Russia’s military buildup on the country’s border with Ukraine. —Matt Williams, The Conversation, 2 Feb. 2022

The leagues saw a need to make a countermove, and that was what was revealed today. —Joe Harrington, USA TODAY, 24 Aug. 2021

One possible countermove was for conservative state legislators to reëngineer the way the Electoral College has worked for more than a hundred years, in essence by invoking the Independent Legislature Doctrine. —Jane Mayer, The New Yorker, 2 Aug. 2021

For every countermove that an offense presents, pitching presents another counter. —BostonGlobe.com, 26 Apr. 2021

Hence the American countermove toward independence. —William Hogeland, The New Republic, 25 Jan. 2021

See More

Word History

First Known Use

1858, in the meaning defined above