swordlengths

Noun

swordlength (plural swordlengths)

1. A distance equal to the length of a sword.
   • All danger of that, however—which (though of course I should have done it unhesitatingly,) would have been not a little disagreeable in a country where respectability is measured by swordlengths just as silk is by yardlengths—is entirely over.1852 June 24, John Ruskin, edited by John Lewis Bradley, Ruskin’s Letters from Venice, 1851-1852, New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press; London: Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press...