Word.ws English Dictionary

machinegun

machinegun is the alternative spelling of machine gun.

machinegun is the alternative spelling of machine-gun.

Meaning of machine gun

Noun

machine gun (plural machine guns)

  1. A type of fully automatic firearm that fires bullets in rapid succession by a single action of the trigger and is capable of sustained fire.
    • I'm gonna get you, baby / Like a machine gun, I'm gonna… Tak-Tak-Tak-Tak-Tak1974, “I'm Gonna Get You”, performed by Eleanore Mills

Meaning of machine-gun

Verb

machine-gun (third-person singular simple present machine-guns, present participle machine-gunning, simple past and past participle machine-gunned)

  1. To fire a machine gun.
  2. To shoot (people, etc.) with a machine gun.
    • During a time when the New Right is becoming increasingly powerful, when gay people are machine-gunned down in the streets, lesbians and gay men are recognizing the necessity of helping each other out.1980 December 6, “Thank You”, in Gay Community News, volume 8, number 20, page 4
  3. To shoot (something) out of or as if out of a machine gun.
    • The opportunity for examining this historical phenomenon was lost on the producers of Making Sense of the Sixties, as images of rock festivals and tragedies were machine-gunned at the viewer, presumably to recreate a sense of the general confusion (as opposed to the cultural excitement) of the...1991 February 4, Owen Shows, “Start Making Sense”, in Gay Community News, volume 18, number 28, page 16

Forms of machinegun

Noun
pluralmachineguns
Verb
third-person singular presentmachineguns
present participlemachinegunning
past participlemachinegunned
pastmachinegunned

Origin of machinegun

From machine + gun.

Questions about machinegun

What is machinegun the alternative spelling of?
Machinegun is the alternative spelling of machine gun.

Words near machinegun in the dictionary

  1. machineability
  2. machineable
  3. machined
  4. machineful
  5. machinefuls
  6. machinegun
  7. machinegunned
  8. machinegunner
  9. machinegunners
  10. machinegunning
  11. machineguns

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: machinegun (page history and authors); machine gun (page history and authors); machine-gun (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.

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Cite this entry: “machinegun.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/machinegun. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.