Word.ws English Dictionary

Minié ball

Minié ball noun: a muzzle-loading bullet with a hollow base, much used in the second half of the nineteenth century.

minié ball: a muzzle-loading bullet with a hollow base, much used in the second half of the nineteenth century
Image: Mike Cumpston, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

Minié ball (plural Minié balls)

  1. (historical) A muzzle-loading bullet with a hollow base, much used in the second half of the nineteenth century.
    • So intense was the firing that at one point just behind the southern lines an oak tree nearly two feet thick was cut down by minié balls.1988, James McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, Oxford, published 2004, page 730
    • Minié ball, judging from everybody else's wounds around that time.2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage, published 2007, page 112

Forms of Minié ball

pluralMinié balls

Origin of Minié ball

Named after one of its developers, Claude-Étienne Minié.

Questions about Minié ball

What does Minié ball mean?
Minié ball means a muzzle-loading bullet with a hollow base, much used in the second half of the nineteenth century.
What part of speech is Minié ball?
Minié ball is a noun.
What is the plural of Minié ball?
The plural of Minié ball is Minié balls.

Words near Minié ball in the dictionary

  1. minizone
  2. minizones
  3. minizoo
  4. minizoos
  5. Minié
  6. Minié ball
  7. Minié balls
  8. Minié rifle
  9. Minié rifles
  10. Miniș
  11. Minjah

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: Minié ball (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: “Minié ball.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/mini%C3%A9_ball. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.