firelock

Example Sentences

Recent Examples of Synonyms for firelock
Noun
  • On April 19, 1775, the crack of a musket marked the first official command for colonists to fire upon the red-coated army of Britain’s King George III.
    Lisa Meyers McClintick, USA Today, 21 June 2025
  • Depictions of Warren tend to show him in military uniform, with a sword or a musket.
    Eliza McGraw, Smithsonian Magazine, 17 June 2025
Noun
  • First-generation matchlock rifles, tanks, and aircraft had major limitations but improved over time.
    Paul Scharre, Foreign Affairs, 15 Feb. 2018
  • Guns are a part of American life, and have been since the very beginning, from the matchlock muskets arming the earliest colonies to the Colt revolvers and Winchester rifles of the Old West to the Glock handgun of today.
    Kyle Mizokami, Popular Mechanics, 7 Mar. 2018
Noun
  • Beretta traces its history to 1526, when Bartolomeo Beretta (d. 1565), a rifle barrel maker in the small northern Italian town of Gardone, sold 185 arquebus barrels—a handheld long gun and a forerunner to the modern rifle—to the Republic of Venice.
    Giacomo Tognini, Forbes, 25 Mar. 2025
  • The worshipers insisted on congregating to pray at the crucifix in the local church and threatened to shoot with an arquebus – a long gun used during the Renaissance period – anyone who got in their way.
    Hannah Marcus, The Conversation, 25 Sep. 2020
Noun
  • The flintlock pistol that Torres is given by the Yautja to fight his fellow prisoners is known by Predator fans as the Raphael Adolini 1715 pistol for an engraved plate that says just that.
    Louis Peitzman, Vulture, 13 June 2025
  • Although a gunshot from a flintlock pistol lasts only an eye blink, the sound is composed of numerous elements: the squeeze of the trigger, the strike of the firing mechanism against the flint, the ignition of the powder, the slug’s passage through the barrel, the report, the impact.
    Alexis Soloski, New York Times, 3 Jan. 2025
Noun
  • When the occupants of the boat refused to surrender, the crew fired warning shots with a shotgun and then fired pepper-ball rounds onto the skiff, the Coast Guard reported.
    City News Service, San Diego Union-Tribune, 14 July 2025
  • Mary Winkler, wife to the town’s Fourth Street Church of Christ minister Matthew Winkler, had shot her husband in the back with a shotgun in their bedroom, killing him.
    Angele Latham, The Tennessean, 9 July 2025
Noun
  • And with the Trump administration taking a blunderbuss to anything that remotely resembles DEI, the mood across the entertainment industries is generally apprehensive.
    Zak Cheney-Rice, Vulture, 2 June 2025
  • What the Supreme Court should not do is hand down a blunderbuss of a legal rule — one that could very well throw every public school in the country into turmoil — based on a half-baked legal theory constructed by lawyers who don’t even know if their clients’ rights were violated yet.
    Ian Millhiser, Vox, 15 Apr. 2025
Noun
  • Weapons of any kind including, but not limited to, firearms and knives.
    Ed Masley, AZCentral.com, 14 July 2025
  • Outside the restaurant, a security guard approached Hodgson and asked him to leave since firearms were not allowed on the property, according to the news release.
    Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 11 July 2025
Noun
  • They were then directed to a safe house where a pistol with a silencer was waiting for them.
    Sophie Tanno, CNN Money, 13 July 2025
  • Police said Wright placed the pistol to his head and fired one shot.
    Natalie Davies, Freep.com, 11 July 2025
Examples are automatically compiled from online sources to show current usage. Read More Opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

Browse Nearby Words

Cite this Entry

“Firelock.” Merriam-Webster.com Thesaurus, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/firelock. Accessed 19 Jul. 2025.

Last Updated: - Updated example sentences
Love words? Need even more definitions?

Subscribe to America's largest dictionary and get thousands more definitions and advanced search—ad free!