How to Use collateral damage in a Sentence

collateral damage

noun
  • 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
  • Some of them are children of the victims, ‘the collateral damage’ of the drug war.
    — Nancy Tartaglione, Deadline, 11 Dec. 2024
  • Fear of collateral damage is putting the idea on hold for now.
    — Ian Talley, WSJ, 25 Feb. 2022
  • The brewers are collateral damage in a trade war that doesn’t have much to do with them.
    — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 1 Oct. 2020
  • And as in the wild, wild West, there is likely to be collateral damage.
    — Ann Killion, San Francisco Chronicle, 28 Aug. 2021
  • Children are the collateral damage in the plan to get Sam back to Osea.
    — Shannon Carlin, refinery29.com, 28 Sep. 2020
  • So have fun with all of that — just please try to minimize the collateral damage along the way.
    — Author: Wayne and Wanda, Anchorage Daily News, 27 May 2018
  • 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
  • All this could be fixed, but there would be some collateral damage.
    — Neil Senturia, San Diego Union-Tribune, 8 July 2019
  • Zoos have often been collateral damage in war around the world.
    — Washington Post, 5 Mar. 2022
  • Most in the media will trumpet the wage-increase progress, not the hard-to-measure collateral damage.
    — WSJ, 28 June 2019
  • The great Merch Wars of 2016 are in the rearview, but the collateral damage—all merch, all the time, from things and people and brands that aren't also musicians—remains with us.
    — Liz Raiss, GQ, 30 May 2018
  • Also, the lack of care, seeming care, for collateral damage, if things go wrong, has been a big contention for them.
    — Katie Campione, Deadline, 4 Nov. 2024
  • 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
  • This is the collateral damage of addiction, the impact on those who love and worry about the addict.
    — Alexandra Rockey Fleming, chicagotribune.com, 3 July 2018
  • Now there is evidence that the virus causes collateral damage to the heart.
    — Julie Washington, cleveland, 3 Aug. 2020
  • And keep in mind, when the tables turn, collateral damage is inevitable.
    — Mellody Hobson and John W. Rogers Jr., WSJ, 11 Dec. 2020
  • 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
  • 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
  • The collateral damages range from having to halt vital services, like providing HIV treatment, to closing doors.
    — Avery Lotz, Axios, 25 Feb. 2025
  • The city has been afflicted by the ebb and flow of violence for three decades — collateral damage in conflicts that exploded in eastern Congo after the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
    — Emmet Livingstone, NPR, 31 Jan. 2025

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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