assailment


Also found in: Thesaurus, Idioms.

as·sail

 (ə-sāl′)
tr.v. as·sailed, as·sail·ing, as·sails
1. To attack violently, as with blows or military force; assault.
2. To attack verbally, as with ridicule or censure. See Synonyms at attack.
3. To trouble or beset, as with questions or doubts.

[Middle English assailen, from Old French asalir, asaill-, from Vulgar Latin *assalīre, variant of Latin assilīre, to jump on : ad-, onto; see ad- + salīre, to jump; see sel- in Indo-European roots.]

as·sail′a·ble adj.
as·sail′a·bil′i·ty n.
as·sail′er n.
as·sail′ment n.
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

assailment

noun
The American Heritage® Roget's Thesaurus. Copyright © 2013, 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive ?
"The silence of the repeated assailment of our work by white female colleagues, our professor's failure to acknowledge and assuage the escalating hostility directed at the only Male of Color in this cohort" had produced a "hostile and unsafe climate for Scholars of Color."
Years before the ascent of apparatus theory, Brakhage indicted the monocular perspective of the camera lens and deemed the "absolute realism" of the film image a myth in need of assailment. He acknowledged that a prelapsarian return to infantile vision is impossible, but took it as his task to create a cinema of nonmimetic revelation that would be true to the experience of subjective, embodied perception "before 'the beginning was the word.'"
Then the convincing stops, finally, and I can open my eyes again, drink a glass of water, or use the bathroom, until half an hour or an hour later, the assailment starts all over.
This assailment on them is no lesser widespread on other forums.