lance
/læns/ noun B2- A weapon of war, consisting of a long shaft or handle and a steel blade or head; a spear carried by horsemen.
- A wooden spear, sometimes hollow, used in jousting or tilting, designed to shatter on impact with the opposing knight’s armour.
- A whaling implement consisting of a long wooden shaft with a projecting iron shank tipped with a broad, leaf-shaped cutting blade, used to kill harpooned whales by repeated thrusts.
- A soldier armed with a lance; a lancer.
- An instrument which conveys the charge of a piece of ordnance and forces it home.
- A small iron rod which suspends the core of the mold in casting a shell.
- One of the small paper cases filled with combustible composition, which mark the outlines of a figure.
- A lancet.
Plural lances
From the library
There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines and lilac-tinted Bouncing Bets; clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover white with its delicate, fragrant, feathery sprays; scarlet lightning that shot its fiery lances over prim white musk-flowers; a garden it was where sunshine lingered and bees hummed, and winds, beguiled into loitering, purred and rustled.
If you can imagine a lance, or a battering ram, or a hammer weighing nearly half a ton driven by a cool, quiet mind living in the handle of it, you can roughly imagine what Kaa was like when he fought.
I don't quite look the smart Lance-Corporal Emsworth, of B Squadron, do I?"
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