rifle

UK/ˈɹaɪfəl/US/ˈɹaɪfəl/

nounB22 meanings Very common — you will meet it every day · #1,919 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: rifles, rifled, rifling

A rifle is a long gun held against the shoulder to shoot at a distance. Two hands, and a stock against the shoulder.

The name comes from the rifling, the spiral grooves cut inside the barrel that spin the bullet and make it fly straight, which is the whole reason a rifle is accurate where a musket was not. That single invention changed warfare. There is a completely separate verb, since rifling through a drawer means searching it quickly and untidily, and that use has nothing to do with guns at all.

Definitions of rifle

1nounrifleA long-barrelled gun fired from the shoulder.B2~98%
“The rifle was locked in a cabinet.”
2verbsearchTo search hurriedly through something.C1~2%
“Somebody had rifled through the desk.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.

Where it comes from

Two words landed on one spelling. The gun is short for rifled gun, named for the spiral grooves cut inside the barrel, while rifling through a drawer comes from Old French rifler, to scratch or to plunder.

Old French
rifler
Middle English
riflen
English, today
rifle

Built from

riflian · Old English — to wrinkle

From Middle English riflen, from Old French rifler. Originally short for “rifled gun”, referring to the spiral grooves inside the barrel. From Middle English riflen (“to rob, plunder, search through”), from Old French rifler (“to lightly scratch, scrape off, plunder”), from Old High German riffilōn (compare German riffeln (“to score, make grooves in, ripple”), archaic Dutch rijfelen (“to scrape”), Old English rifelan, riflian (“to wrinkle”)), frequentative of Proto-Germanic rīfaną (compare Old Norse rífa (“to tear, break”)). More at rive.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in A Man Called Ove

First appears in chapter 31 of A Man Called Ove.

Practise this word

rifle in the wild

The M16 rifle is a family of assault rifles adapted from the ArmaLite AR-15 rifle for the United States military.
M16 rifle
In 1983, the United States Marine Corps adopted the M16A2 rifle, and the US Army adopted it in 1986.
M16 rifle
Most rifles are designed to be held with both hands and braced against the shoulder via a buttstock for stability.
Rifle
From the late 19th century all the way through both World Wars, bolt action rifles were the standard infantry service weapons for most of the world's military forces.
Bolt action
The M1 Garand or M1 rifle is a semi-automatic rifle that was the service rifle of the U.S.
M1 Garand

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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.

Definitions of rifle

1nounrifleA long-barrelled gun fired from the shoulder.B2~98%

“The rifle was locked in a cabinet.”

2verbsearchTo search hurriedly through something.C1~2%

“Somebody had rifled through the desk.”

Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.