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heat-ray

noun

Etymology

The fictional sense was coined by British science fiction author H. G. Wells in 1896 in The War of the Worlds.

Definitions

  1. A weapon that fires a beam of extremely high temperature.

    • Near-synonyms: ray-gun, ray gun, death ray, energy weapon
    • In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned[.]

  2. Synonym of calorific ray.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for heat-ray. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA