casualty

A casualty is a person or thing that gets hurt or damaged in some way.

You might hear the word "casualty" when watching news reports of accidents or natural disasters. Imagine you see a story on TV about a big storm that hit a city, and it caused damage to many buildings and injured several people. In this case, those people who got hurt are called casualties. If your friend was in a car crash, they might be considered a casualty too - not necessarily someone who died, but someone who got hurt or affected by the accident.

This word is often used to describe people who were caught up in some kind of emergency or disaster, like war, disease outbreaks, or major accidents. In medicine, doctors talk about casualties when patients get hurt or die during treatment. It's not just a person who died; it could be someone who got sick or was injured too. When you hear the word "casualty" in news stories or discussions, it usually refers to people or things that suffered some kind of harm.