lightning bolts

Noun

lightning bolt (plural lightning bolts)

1. A single, visible discharge of lightning.
   • Shortly after dinner one day — it was a hot summer afternoon — a very severe thunderstorm broke out over the city and after it had lasted some ten to fifteen minutes an exceptionally bright lightning bolt flashed through the air followed immediately by a terrific crash of thunder.1913, Popular Electricity and the World's Advance, page 192
2. A conventional representation of a lightning bolt as a zigzag line.
3. A conventional representation of a lightning bolt in heraldry or in artistic depictions of thunder gods, for example as a winged and barbed torch.
4. (figuratively) Something that shocks or energizes, especially something that does so suddenly.
   • In this sense there was an uncomfortable similarity between the lettre de cachet, the “lightning bolt of despotism,” and the people that judged, not like a court of law, but like a force of nature.2011, Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution, →ISBN