![]() ![]() In fact it isn't particularly the earliest use of it appears to come from around the beginning of the 19th century. China, we might expect it to be very old. Given the antiquity of the three words that make up the phrase and the fact that guns have been in use since at least the Hundred Years' War in 1450, and even earlier in other countries e.g. If you prefer such nicety then your rifle's grooves are helicoid not spiral. Note again: that some make a distinction between spirals (that is, coiling around a fixed point - like a watch-spring) and helixes (that is, advancing around an axis - like a corkscrew). 'Rifle' derives from the French verb 'rifler' - to scratch or scrape. What makes rifles different from earlier guns are the spiral grooves inside the barrel, which cause the bullet to rotate and fly more truly. ![]() Note: that 'lock, stock and barrel' refers to muskets, not rifles. It may have been that the term migrated from cannons or other sorts of gun which were more barrel-shaped. After all, in the 15th century people would have been very familiar with barrels as the squat coopered tubs used for storage - hardly similar to the parallel-sided cylindrical tubes that were used in muskets. This is the least obvious of these three terms to have been chosen to name a musket part. The barrel, that is, a cylindrical object, is an even older word and was well-established by the 15th century. It was used as early as 1495 in association with Tudor guns, in a bill for 'gonne stokkes'. 'Stock' is the old term for wooden butt or stump and is a generic term for a solid base. The stock, which is the wooden butt-end of the gun. The term 'lock' was probably adopted because the mechanism resembles a door lock. ![]() Various forms of 'lock' muskets were used from the 1400s onwards, e.g. The lock, or flintlock, which is the firing mechanism. This explanation is entirely fanciful though - the 'whole thing' in question when this phrase originated was a musket. I've seen it suggested that this phrase refers to all of a shopkeeper's possessions - the stock in trade, the items stored in barrels and the lock to the door. What's the origin of the phrase 'Lock, stock and barrel'? Lock, stock and barrel means the whole thing, entire and complete. If you've been using KAYAK successfully up until now, try closing your browser and starting again.Lock, stock and barrel What's the meaning of the phrase 'Lock, stock and barrel'? Please send us a message and we'll try to figure out what went wrong. Probably something about the web browser you are using made KAYAK think you are a bot. They tend to try to cram large suitcases in the overhead bin, and they prattle on about celebrities they know while you are trying to watch the movie. For example, we don't want bots running about trying to book airline tickets. Bots are generally a good thing, but some web pages are for humans only. KAYAK uses bots to search for travel deals. Search engines like Google use robots to build up search results. What is a bot?Ī bot, or robot, or crawler is software that visits web sites and collects data from them without a human present. If you are seeing this page, it means that KAYAK thinks you are a "bot," and the page you were trying to get to is only useful for humans. ![]()
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