shrapnel.
An anti-personnel artillery shell used in World War I which carries a large number of individual bullets or balls close to the target and then ejects them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually.
Meaning & usage
An anti-personnel artillery shell used in World War I which carries a large number of individual bullets or balls close to the target and then ejects them to allow them to continue along the shell's trajectory and strike the target individually.
The bullets or balls from the aforementioned type of artillery shell.
Any shot, fragments, or debris thrown out by an exploding shell, bomb, or landmine.
Debris.
The dog ate my sandwich, and there was shrapnel all over the place from him tearing open the bag.
Loose change.
Where this word comes from
From Shrapnel. Named after British army officer Henry Shrapnel (1761–1842) who invented an anti-personnel shell that transported a large number of bullets to the target before releasing them, at a far greater distance than rifles could fire the bullets individually. The surname is likely a metathesized form of Charbonnel, a diminutive of Old French charbon (“charcoal”) in reference to hair color, complexion, or the like.
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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.
Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.