How to Use collateral damage in a Sentence

collateral damage

noun
  • Yet progress is not painless and collateral damage in the building of a long-time contender is unavoidable.
    Jerry Beach, Forbes, 24 Sep. 2024
  • The collateral damage in this cold war, inevitably, will be a pitcher’s getting hurt from hitting or running the bases.
    New York Times, 26 Mar. 2021
  • Hong Kong is in the midst of a perfect storm of a pandemic, social unrest and collateral damage from a trade war.
    Justin Doebele, Forbes, 3 Mar. 2021
  • Terry has a particular set of skills, and one of those skills is minimizing collateral damage.
    Daniel Joyaux, IndieWire, 4 Sep. 2024
  • The collateral damage has hit the wallets of aficionados of French wine, Irish and Scottish whisky and Italian hard cheeses.
    Adrian Croft, Fortune, 4 Mar. 2021
  • Tencent has already seen collateral damage from the new regulations, though investors had shrugged this off, pumping up the stock even as Alibaba was punished.
    Fortune, 12 Mar. 2021
  • Their supporters say they are being held as collateral damage after Meng’s arrest and the spying charges against them are considered a pressure tactic to force her release.
    NBC News, 22 Mar. 2021
  • But the collateral damage already done to people struggling with drugs and alcohol — through anxiety, relapse, and death — has been a heavy blow for the state and its recovery community.
    Joe Sullivan, BostonGlobe.com, 14 Mar. 2021
  • At first, the dynamic appeared to be little changed: Israel used precision weapons against Shukr to minimize collateral damage.
    Dana Stroul, Foreign Affairs, 23 Sep. 2024
  • By the end of most of them, blood is on the floor, and the collateral damage is steep.
    Mark Harris Keita Morimoto, New York Times, 27 Feb. 2024
  • Fear of collateral damage is putting the idea on hold for now.
    Ian Talley, WSJ, 25 Feb. 2022
  • And as in the wild, wild West, there is likely to be collateral damage.
    Ann Killion, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Aug. 2021
  • Winning four games in four days is a big ask, but that doesn’t mean there won’t be collateral damage along the way.
    San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 Jan. 2023
  • Seems there is a lot of collateral damage around this kind of lifestyle.
    Matt Thompson, Spin, 31 Aug. 2023
  • Along the way, people have been a kind of collateral damage.
    Brenda Goodman, CNN, 11 June 2024
  • If the missile can’t find the target, it can be assigned a crash point so as not to risk collateral damage.
    Sébastien Roblin, Popular Mechanics, 12 May 2023
  • But in the meantime, there could be some collateral damage.
    Alex Tapscott, Fortune, 28 June 2022
  • Zoos have often been collateral damage in war around the world.
    Washington Post, 5 Mar. 2022
  • And with the local tech world such an easy target for snark and scorn, no wonder the lush rooftop suffers collateral damage.
    John King, San Francisco Chronicle, 4 Sep. 2022
  • All these headwinds caused collateral damage to the wealth of this year’s listees.
    Justin Doebele, Forbes, 12 Aug. 2022
  • This has all been a huge turn-on for them, the collateral damage not even worth considering.
    Alan Sepinwall, Rolling Stone, 24 May 2022
  • That would allow for less collateral damage to the body and more of a focused treatment for cancer.
    Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 20 Nov. 2021
  • But the risks to Ukrainian culture are more than mere collateral damage.
    New York Times, 15 July 2022
  • The truth of the matter is, 2,000 pound bombs that are not precision guided inevitably lead to a lot of collateral damage.
    CBS News, 19 May 2024
  • Through no choice of their own, kids are too often the collateral damage when those adults become lost in ther own chaotic lives.
    Sharon Grigsby, Dallas News, 17 Mar. 2023
  • With a thriller’s pace, the play muses on guilt, intractable conflict and collateral damage.
    Celia Wren, Washington Post, 8 Nov. 2023
  • Still, being able to move forward without collateral damage should be worth the effort in the end.
    Tarot.com, Baltimore Sun, 6 May 2024
  • The reasons for the slowdown are straightforward, collateral damage of all the progress made on other Covid fronts.
    Ed Silverman, STAT, 21 Sep. 2022
  • But the collateral damage from the sanctions has been wider than expected.
    Daniel Flatley, Bloomberg.com, 14 June 2022
  • In order to grow, the company has to reinvent itself, and there will be a lot of collateral damage when that happens.
    John Brandon, Forbes, 11 Nov. 2022

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'collateral damage.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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