poleaxe

US/ˈpoʊlˌæks/

verbC2Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechneutral

To poleaxe is to knock somebody down with one blow. Poleaxed by the news, went down poleaxed, poleaxe him.

The figurative use is the commoner, and being poleaxed by news means being completely floored by it. The weapon was a long-handled axe, and the poll in the older spelling means a head rather than a pole.

Definitions of poleaxe

1verbpoleaxeTo knock somebody down with one blow.C2
“The boxer was poleaxed by a single punch in the first round.”

poleaxe is a felling.

Where it comes from

From pollax, poll, meaning a head, plus axe, with the spelling later drawn towards pole.

From earlier pollax, from poll + axe, with the spelling influenced by pole.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Song of Ice and Fire

Practise this word

poleaxe in the wild

Bills, picks, dane axes, spears, glaives, guandaos, pudaos, pikes, poleaxes, halberds, harpoons, sovnyas, naginatas, bardiches, war scythes, yari and lances are all varieties of polearms.
Polearm
The Lochaber axe (Gaelic: tuagh-chatha) is a type of poleaxe that was used almost exclusively in Scotland.
Lochaber axe
The poleaxe (also poleax, pollaxe and other similar spellings) is a European polearm that was used by medieval infantry.
Poleaxe
Poleaxes differ from halberds because the blade is vertical, not diagonal, and poleaxes are generally shorter than halberds.
Poleaxe
Le Jeu de la Hache ("The Play of the Axe") is a French manual on combat with the poleaxe dating to c. 1400.
Le Jeu de la Hache

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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