fusilo in Esperanto: rifle (noun)

Translation

rifle

Word origin

From French fusil, which began life as the steel you strike a flint against, from Vulgar Latin focilis petra, a fire-stone, from focus ('hearth'). The flintlock took the name of the spark, and the gun kept it.

Origin: French
Root: fusil
English cognates: fusillade, focus

Examples

.

An old rifle from the last century hangs in the museum.

.

The soldier carried a heavy rifle on his shoulder.

.

That antique rifle no longer works.

The best false seam in this chapter. ends in -, and -- is the Esperanto suffix for the tool that does a thing: o a knife, a key, o a pen. So the eye reads fus- plus -- and looks for a verb . There is none. - is a whole borrowed root, and the -- inside it is French spelling rather than Esperanto grammar.

The word that really is built that way is o. Pafi is to shoot, so o is the shooting-tool: a gun, any gun. That is the generic word, and it is the one to reach for when you do not know or do not care what kind of gun it is. is the specific long-barrelled shoulder weapon a soldier carries - the rifle or the musket - and it names an object rather than describing a function.

Register: this is a museum and history word on this site. The Esperanto corpus we build from is largely nineteenth-century, where the turns up in translated novels and war memoirs, and that is where the examples above sit. Related vocabulary you will meet in the same passages: kuglo, the ball or bullet; armilo, a weapon of any sort; kanono, the artillery piece.

Related words

pafi

to shoot, to fire

kuglo

bullet; cannonball, shot

armilo

weapon, arm

soldato

soldier

muzeo

museum

Where this fits

The 1,000 most common Esperanto words

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