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gunfire

nouncommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//ˈɡʌnfʌɪə//

Shots from a gun or guns, typically creating loud report.

noun

  1. 1

    Shots from a gun or guns, typically creating loud report.

    Let's hide in the trees to avoid the gunfire.

    Sergeant, direct your gunfire toward that copse of trees.

    When sensors record a gunlike noise in, say, Cape Town or Chicago, software analyzes it for the sonic signatures of gunfire, and within seconds Beisner and his team listen to those audio files and look at those recorded waveforms at their office in Newark, Calif.

  2. 2

    The use of gunpowder-type weapons, mainly cannon, as opposed to swords or bayonets.

    Killing people became much easier and faster once armies started using gunfire.

  3. 3

    The time of firing of the morning gun or the evening gun.

    The grand event on the 14th was the shooting for the second stage for the Queen's prize. This commenced punctually at gunfire in the morning : the men being divided into four squads at the long ranges on the north side of the common.

  4. 4

    slangTea, a cup of tea, especially one served early in the morning before first parade.

    They had only in them the rolled mattresses, the neatly piled bed-boards and the empty tea-buckets of the orderly-men, empied of their last gun-fire.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰen- Proto-Indo-European *-tis Proto-Indo-European *gʷʰéntis Proto-Germanic *gunþiz Old Norse gunnr Proto-Indo-European *kelh₂-der. Proto-Indo-European *kelh₂tís Proto-Germanic *hildiz Old Norse hildr Old Norse Gunnhildrder. Middle English gunne English gun Proto-Indo-European *péh₂wr̥ Proto-Germanic *fōr Proto-West Germanic *fuir Old English fȳr Middle English fyr English fire English gunfire From gun + fire.

Forms

plural
gunfires
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).