English Dictionary

sortie

/ˈsɔːti/

noun

An attack made by troops from a besieged position; a sally. / (aviation) An operational flight carried out by a single military aircraft. / An act of venturing out to do a task, etc.

The troops made a sortie from their besieged position.

意味（1）

An attack made by troops from a besieged position; a sally.

The events of these sieges show that a bold and vigorous sortie in force might carry destruction through every part of a besieger's approaches, where the guard is injudiciously disposed and ill commanded; but that if due precautions have been observed in forming the approaches and posting the defenders, any sortie from a besieged place must be checked with loss in their advance, when the approaches are still distant; or when the approaches are near, should a sortie succeed in pushing into them by a sudden rush, the assailants must inevitably be driven out again in a moment, with terrible slaughter.

意味（2）

(aviation) An operational flight carried out by a single military aircraft.

Their aircraft had no belly gunners and were at the mercy of Luftwaffe fighters that attacked from below. Whenever they lifted off on a mission, they departed with the knowledge that this sortie could easily be their last.

意味（3）

An act of venturing out to do a task, etc.

‘I'm just not interested in the whole class crap that seems to needle you and all the tax-payers,’ the teenager tells some ‘pre-historic monster’ of an adult, with a ‘cool’ snobbishness which MacInnes's companion on many of his Notting Hill sorties, the late Professor Richard Wollheim, compared to the ‘Sang Froid’ of Baudelaire's Dandy as he cruised through Fin-de-Siecle Paris with a similar sensibility, or lack of it.

意味（4）

(figuratively); (astronautics) An operational flight carried out by a spacecraft involving a return to Earth.

意味（5）

(military) Synonym of sally port (“an entry to or opening into a fortification to enable a sally”)

[I]t was all encompassed by the palisades and breastworks, to which were but three sorties, whence the defenders might sally, or through which at need the vanguard might secure a retreat.

意味（6）

(photography) A series of aerial photographs taken during the flight of an aircraft; (by extension) a photography session.