platoon
pluh-TOON · noun
Origin
Platoon comes from obsolete French plauton, a variant of peloton, which itself came from Middle French pelote plus the suffix -on.
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Related words
Platoon is a doublet of peloton — the two words descend from the same root but arrived in English by different routes. It's also worth comparing to pellet, which shares that same small-round-thing ancestry.
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