walking fire
walking fire noun: will o' the wisp.
Noun
walking fire (countable and uncountable, plural walking fires)
- Will o' the wisp
- Prithe Nunckle be content, this is a naughty night to swim in, now a little fire in a wild field, were like an old leachers heart, a small sparke, all the rest in bodie cold, looke here comes a walking fire.1603, William Shakespeare, M. William Shak-speare: His True Chronicle Historie of the life and death of King LEAR and his three Daughters.
- Had we no walking fire, Nor saucer-ey'd devil of these woods That led us ?1646, Sir John Suckling, The Goblins
- A line of infantry equipped with automatic weapons advancing in a coordinated attack.
- To counter this the French introduced 'walking fire'. The infantry used man-carried automatic weapons to keep the defender pinned down with a continuous hail of bullets for those last dangerous yards.1975, War Monthly, numbers 10-21
- Walking fire was used to sweep an area with artillery. Assaulting infantry often approached an objective from behind the walking fires; this kept the enemy under cover until the assaulting troops were almost on top of them.1990, Gregory R. Clark, Words of the Vietnam War
Examples of walking fire in a sentence
- Do you expect such infallible Direction, from such a Will with a Whisp, or walking Fire, that leads you into such Brakes of Contention and Bogs of Uncertainty.1711, Francis Bugg, The Quakers Present Principles Farther Expos'd to Publick View, page 8:
- Sometimes he'd counterfeit a voyce, And travellers call astray ; Sometimes a walking fire he'd be, And lead them from their way.1855, Charlotte Mary Yonge, The history of sir Thomas Thumb:
- Although difficult to learn and to perform, walking fire, when practiced in co-ordination with hand- and rifle grenadiers, was the essence of training for the assault.1995, Gerard Demaison, Yves Buffetaut, R. Blake Stevens, Honour bound: the Chauchat machine rifle, page 61:
- In the Pacific theater, the navy, marines, and army learned and perfected the technique of providing assaulting infantry with a wall of walking fire.2003, Adrian R. Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory, page 222:
Forms of walking fire
| plural | walking fires |
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Questions about walking fire
- What does walking fire mean?
- Walking fire means will o' the wisp.
- How do you use walking fire in a sentence?
- Do you expect such infallible Direction, from such a Will with a Whisp, or walking Fire, that leads you into such Brakes of Contention and Bogs of Uncertainty.
- What part of speech is walking fire?
- Walking fire is a noun.
- What is the plural of walking fire?
- The plural of walking fire is walking fires.
Words near walking fire in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: walking fire (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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