Noun: torpedo
| Singular | torpedo |
| Plural | torpedoes; torpedos |
Sample Sentences
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Faire Queene, forbeare to angle for the fiſh, / Which being caught, ſtrikes him that takes it dead, / I meane that vile Torpedo, Gaueſton, / That now I hope flotes on the Iriſh Seas [1594, Christopher Marlow[e], The Troublesome Raigne and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England: […], London: […] [Eliot’s Court Press] for Henry Bell, […], published 1622, →OCLC, [Act I]:]
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The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he is born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo's touch […]. [1790, Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men:]
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"A childhood Misadventure with a Torpedo," Dixon, with a brief move of his head toward Mason, confides, "— thus his Sensitivity at all References to the,"— whispering,— "electrickal!" [1997, Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon, New York: Henry Holt and Company, →ISBN, →OCLC, page 286:]
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I stood rigid, spellbound, watching the white wake of the torpedo. It struck us on the starboard side almost amidships. The vessel rocked as though the sea beneath it had been uptorn by a mighty volcano. [1918, Edgar Rice Burrows, The Land that Time Forgot, HTML edition, The Gutenberg Project, published 2008:]
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Four Japanese torpedo boats launch an attack on the Suvorov. Despite burning steadily for several hours and now taking a torpedo to the stern, the ship still lashes out at its attackers with a few remaining guns. With no pressing need to continue the attack to closer range, the torpedo boats fall back, noting the position for a night attack if Suvorov survives that long. [2019 September 18, Drachinifel, 25:58 from the start, in Battle of Tsushima - When the 2nd Pacific Squadron thought it couldn't get any worse..., archived from the original on 04 Dec 2022:]
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And if fate should turn her back on them, or turn away from them, leaving them to their own devices, and should they find themselves be sore afraid, then they would simply sail away to the other side of the world. They would ride like the wind. They would sail once more into the breach and damn the torpedos! God save the Queen! And the devil take the hindmost! [2020, Ted Bell, Dragonfire, New York, N.Y.: Berkley, published 2021, →ISBN, page 536:]
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In several human neurodegenerative diseases, focal axonal swellings on Purkinje cells – known as torpedoes – have been associated with Purkinje cell loss. Interestingly, torpedoes are also reported to appear transiently during development in rat cerebellum. [2016 November 2, Lovisa Ljungberg, Daneck Lang-Ouellette, Angela Yang, Sriram Jayabal, Sabrina Quilez, Alanna J. Watt, “Transient Developmental Purkinje Cell Axonal Torpedoes in Healthy and Ataxic Mouse Cerebellum”, in Frontiers in Cellular Neuroscience, volume 10, →DOI, article 248, page 1:]
Nouns inflected like torpedo
deuteroconch,
borshch,
bortsch,
hypervolcano,
mud volcano,
Milton mango,
bulk cargo,
FIZ,
DES,
DEX,
yellow-fever mosquito,
BMS,
BBS,
Kölsch,
CMS,
Negro,
nonzero,
cryptobranch,
active volcano,
winnebago, etc. (List truncated at 20 nouns)
Etymology
1. * Borrowed from Latin torpēdō (“a torpedo fish; numbness, torpidity, electric ray”), from torpeō (“to be stiff, numb, torpid; to be astounded; to be inactive”) + -ēdō (noun suffix), from Proto-Indo-European *ster- (“stiff”). In the military sense coined by Robert Fulton in 1805. Cognate with Old English steorfan (“to die”), Ancient Greek στερεός (stereós, “solid”), Lithuanian tirpstu (“to become rigid”), Old Church Slavonic трупети (trupeti).
2. * (type of car): From 1908, after "the Torpedo", a car designed by Captain Theo Masui. See: Latin Nouns '
torpēdō', Old English Nouns '
steorfan'.
Verbs referencing "torpedo"
Finnish Nouns
torpedo, Norwegian Bokmål Nouns
torpedo, Norwegian Nynorsk Nouns
torpedo, German Nouns
Torpedo.