javelin

noun

1. A light spear thrown with the hand and used as a weapon.

   “And when Phinehas the sonne of Eleazar, the sonne of Aaron the Priest saw it, hee rose vp from amongst the Congregation, and tooke a iauelin in his hand. And he went after the man of Israel into the tent, and thrust both of them thorow, the man of Israel, and the woman, thorow her belly: So the plague was stayed from the children of Israel.”

   “Flies the javelin swifter to its mark, / Launched by the vigour of a Roman arm?”

   “With what apprehensions we proceeded, ignorant at what moment we might be greeted by the javelin of some ambushed savage!”

   “As a lion or wild boar turns fiercely on the dogs and men that attack him, while these form a solid wall and shower their javelins as they face him—his courage is all undaunted, but his high spirit will be the death of him;[…]”

   “Searching through snow / For the javelin I had not / Meant to throw right at you / For if it had hit its mark / There’d be blood in the place / Where you stood”

2. A metal-tipped spear thrown for distance in an athletic field event.

   “I managed to medal in the javelin throw.”

3. A javelinfish (Coelorinchus australis).

verb

1. (transitive)To pierce with a javelin.

   “Furrowing a giant oak, and javelining / With darted spikes and splinters of the wood”

   “Eventually ostriches arrived and with arrows I shot them in the burning arena with arrows tipped with small bronze crescents Saw flies buzz at the array of javelinned lions Saw the looks on faces crookedly aghast when before them I hoisted a hacked off ostrich head and wagged my own and grinned”

2. (transitive)To throw like a javelin.

   “He will have questions of all sorts javelined at him from the benches on both sides, from above the gangway and from below it.”

   “There is a thing no man may name; / It comes like beauty, goes like flame. / It haunts dim labyrinths of time / And enters every poet’s rhyme. / Its cry is heard upon the wind / When it is high and javelinned, / And on still nights its steps are heard, / Soft as the footfalls of a bird.”

   “The year the tornado swept through, it scattered the debris of two garages and their contents outward for hundreds of yards. An 8-foot 2-by-4 was javelinned through my bedroom wall; its blunt end stared at me just three feet short of my bed.”

   “good morning city. another day of digging. wrapping. numbering. dnaing. […] of reciting a poem by li po. about forever. about wrapping forever into a ball. about wrapping forever into a ball and javelinning it out to sea. the beautiful beautiful sea.”

   “To retrieve the mophead she would have to immerse her hand into the bucket’s stagnant grey water and kitchen-floor debris. At the thought of doing so, she javelinned the mop handle onto the floor, the speed and violence of which action, afterward, made her feel deranged.”

3. (intransitive)To fall like a javelin.

   “For answer the ship righted as she rolled upon another great swell, leaned as far the other side, and crashed, bows first, into a cleft rock under water which held her as in a vise while her jib boom flew up in splinters, and her foretopgallant and royal mast, with yards and gear and sails, tore loose aloft and javelined down until brought up short by the involved rigging.”

   “The ants broke loose and attacked. In an attempt to beat them off, Ejeka lost grip of his whip which javelinned earthward.”

   “Jagged bolts of lightning javelined down from the sky, attempting to skewer him with their electrical touch.”

   “One man dropped his rifle from high up and it javelined down, with the muzzle burying itself deep in the ground.”