Dictionary
Words, grammatical forms and meanings linked to the ontology.
battering train en · NOUN
Meanings
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(historical) A train of heavy artillery, such as battering rams and catapults, for siege operations.
When the fire reached this barrier, it was compelled to pause, until a concentration of its heat could overcome the moisture, like an army impatiently waiting the operations of a battering train, to open its way to death and desolation.
1823, [James Fenimore Cooper], chapter XXXVII, in The Pioneers, or The Sources of the Susquehanna; […], volume (please specify |volume=I or II), New York, N.Y.: Charles Wiley; […], →OCLC:Be that as it might, numberless great guns, whose thunder had long been the voice of battle,—the artillery of the Armada, the battering-trains of Marlborough, and the adverse cannon of Napoleon and Wellington,—were trundled into the midst of the fire.
1844, Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Earth’s Holocaust”, in Mosses from an Old Manse. […], part II, New York, N.Y.: Wiley and Putnam, published 1846, →OCLC, page 141:
Forms