inroad
Part of speech: noun
Morphological type: compound
Topics: government
military
politics
war
Etymology: The noun is derived from in + road (“(obsolete) act of riding on horseback; hostile ride against a particular area, raid”).
The verb is derived from the noun.
Compound parts: in
road
Inflected forms:
form: inroads
pos: noun
tags: plural
Senses:
gloss: An advance into enemy territory, an attempted invasion; an encroachment, an incursion.
pos: noun
tags: also
figuratively
examples: […] That ſince that time he [Archibald Douglas, 6th Earl of Angus] was become the ſubject of King Henry [VIII] of England, his Majeſty's [James V of Scotland's] greateſt enemy; and was now the cauſe of all the Inroads made by the English into Scotland: […]
[A] child knowing the heate of fire, will as readely iudge of the perrill, as the wiſeſt Senatour, of the inroad of a borderer, or the politick captaine, of the vnequall encoũter with his enimy, […]
Whence is it that ſo many corrupt Opinions have made ſuch an Inroad on Proteſtant Religion, and the Profeſſion of it? Is it not from hence, that many have loſt an Experience of the power and efficacy of the Truth, and ſo have parted with it?
[T]he Britains, left to ſhift for themſelves, and daily haraſſed by cruel Inroads from the Picts, were forced to call in the Saxons for their Defence; […]
The brave and active Conſtantius delivered Gaul from a very furious inroad of the Alemanni; and his victories of Langres and Vindoniſſa appear to have been actions of conſiderable danger and merit.
While from their lovely climate, the poets native to their sweet south, the old ruins hallowed with the memories of other days, the lovely paintings, the still diviner statues, which had been their constant companions—the character had imperceptibly caught a tone of romance, calculated long to resist the inroads of worldliness and deceit.
[A] certain English colonel passed though the former's country with a body of men-at-arms, on the very day when the O'Mahonys had made an inroad upon our territories, and carried off a frightful plunder of our flocks and herds.
And everywhere the people, or the populace, take their own government upon themselves; and open 'kinglessness,' what we call anarchy, […] is everywhere the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I have known nothing similar.
If clerks do not try to shirk their work, our whole great commercial system breaks down. It is breaking down, under the inroad of women who are adopting the unprecedented and impossible course of taking the system seriously and doing it well.
On the Great North of Scotland section, always a stronghold of four-coupled engines, a great number of small 4-4-0s, some over fifty years old, were still going strong in 1945, but serious inroads are being made into their numbers now.
[T]he discourse of ornament was energetically appropriated by those anxious to defend masculinity and protect feminine virtue against the inroads of luxury and its ill effects on morality.
[I]n many European states, the whole notion of retirement at pensionable age and consequential entitlement to a pension seems to fall within the domain of social security law rather than forming part of the contract-based system of regulation of termination of employment. There may therefore be significant inroads into the notion of a unified or integrated contract-based system of regulation of termination of employment. However, in most European legal systems it would seem that these inroads do not encroach upon the essential integrity or unity of the contract-based system of regulation of termination of employment.
On top of all that, rightwing populists and leftwing progressives have made significant inroads into western politics.
gloss: Often followed by in, into, or on: initial progress made toward accomplishing a goal or solving a problem.
pos: noun
tags: figuratively
plural-normally
examples: Three weeks into it, I am finally beginning to make inroads on this project.
You must have been fairly surprised at Dr. Glaser's inroads into reprogramming the brain.
Even in our post-Darwinian society, with evolutionary theory making inroads in many areas of the social and human sciences, the cynics' insight retains an ability to stimulate and to provoke.
These insights open up novel inroads in the area of neurorehabilitation by demonstrating that disorders such as amblyopia might be accessible to perceptual training protocols.
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