rearment

Rearment is a term occasionally encountered in English that may be used to mean the act of equipping a state or force with weapons again. However, it is not a standard or widely accepted word in contemporary usage; the conventional term is rearmament. Because rearment is rarely listed in major dictionaries, its appearance is often interpreted as a misspelling, an archaic variant, or a translational artifact rather than a distinct technical concept.

Etymology and usage: The form combines the prefix re- with arm and the noun suffix -ment, mirroring rearmament. Its rarity suggests it is not a stable term in modern political science or military history. In practice, any discussion of arming anew should use rearmament rather than rearment, to avoid confusion.

Contexts: When found in historical texts or translations, rearment may reflect older orthography, OCR errors, or language transfer from languages that form compounds differently. In current policy discourse, the term carries no formal definition beyond being a nonstandard variant.

Related topics include rearmament, arms race, militarization, and disarmament.