Bullets

How to spell bullets

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bullets

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bullets mean?

1. nounMetal projectiles fired from a gun or rifle.
2. nounRound dots used to mark each item in a list.

Bullets in a sentence

• The police recovered several bullets from the scene.

• She broke the summary into short bullets for the slide.

• The range issued a box of bullets for target practice.

• The report used bullets instead of long paragraphs.

Where does bullets come from?

Language of origin: French

This word traces back to the French boulette, a diminutive of boule meaning 'ball', which itself descends from the Latin bulla, a word for any rounded object such as a bubble, a stud, or a small round seal. When English borrowed bullet in the middle of the 1500s, it first described a small cannonball or a round shot, the projectile being literally a 'little ball'. As firearms developed, the meaning narrowed to the metal projectile fired from a gun, even after such projectiles stopped being perfectly spherical. The same Latin bulla gives us 'bulletin' (a little sealed note) and even the 'bull' in 'papal bull', because those documents carried a round lead seal. In modern editing the round typographic dot that marks each item in a list took the name bullet too, returning the word to its original sense of a small ball.

How the word is built

• bullet (small ball; from boule 'ball'
• -et diminutive)
• -s (plural)