campaigns

1. 1
   noun

   Plural of campaign.

   Several advertising campaigns competed for the same audience that spring.

   Historians compared the general's two military campaigns in detail.

   Note

   The plural covers every countable use of the noun: a general's campaigns, a team's campaigns over several seasons, the campaigns a group of role-players runs with the same characters, and the campaigns of a blast furnace between shutdowns. In older English the word could also mean open plains, as a variant of champaign. That sense is now obsolete, but it is worth recognizing when it turns up in early texts.

2. 2
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present indicative of campaign.

   The senator campaigns tirelessly across the state every election season.

   Each year the organization campaigns for stronger environmental protections.

   Note

   Most often the verb takes no object: someone campaigns for a cause or across a region. Racing gives it a transitive use, in which a rider campaigns a horse by keeping it in races through a season. That object-taking pattern is easy to miss, and it echoes the sporting-season meaning of the plural noun.

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