birdshot
birdshot noun: small lead or steel shot, as pieces of ammunition, used in shotgun shells.
Noun
birdshot (countable and uncountable, plural birdshots)
- Small lead or steel shot, as pieces of ammunition, used in shotgun shells.
- In the first shooting, four of the teenagers were sitting on a porch and were peppered with birdshot from a shotgun fired from a passing car around 2:30 p.m., Sheriff John Rutherford said.2007 May 2, “Florida Six Wounded in Shootings”, in New York Times, sourced from The Associated Press
- “Eyes were hit by birdshot pellets and it was deliberate, they are shooting to kill,” said the Tehran doctor. A colleague added that they had removed “20 pellets” from the body of a single protester.2026 January 13, Deepa Parent, William Christou, “Hundreds of gunshot eye injuries found in one Iranian hospital amid brutal crackdown on protests”, in The Guardian, →ISSN
- A rifle or pistol cartridge containing small shot instead of a single larger projectile.
Forms of birdshot
| plural | birdshots |
|---|
Origin of birdshot
From bird + shot.
Questions about birdshot
- What does birdshot mean?
- Birdshot means small lead or steel shot, as pieces of ammunition, used in shotgun shells.
- What part of speech is birdshot?
- Birdshot is a noun.
- What is the plural of birdshot?
- The plural of birdshot is birdshots.
Words near birdshot in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: birdshot (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
Last updated:
Cite this entry: “birdshot.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/birdshot. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.