blade

In archaeology the word marks out a class within the flakes: the long, narrow ones, set apart by proportion rather than by use. A blade may be knapped from flint or another glassy, vitreous stone, or finished by grinding an edge. Because blades are struck from a deliberately prepared core, many from one core point to planned toolmaking, not a lucky break.

Sailors use one word for several fittings below the waterline. Blade can mean the rudder, the daggerboard or the centerboard, any flat foil reaching down into the water. In dinghy talk, "raise the blades" before shallow water covers all of them at once, which saves naming each part separately.

Photographers use the word for two different mechanisms. Aperture blades overlap to set how wide the opening is, and shutter blades decide how long it stays open. When a lens or camera is described as having worn or sticky blades, you need the context to know which of the two is meant.

The nickname comes from the shape: a sprinting foot curved like an upside-down question mark looks more like a blade than a foot. It is the informal word of athletics coverage and conversation. More formal writing tends to say prosthesis or running prosthesis.

Climbers shorten knifeblade to blade, and the two names refer to the same thin piton made for narrow cracks. On the rock, the context of gear and placements makes clear that the word means protection driven into a crack, not anything that cuts.

In data-center talk, blade alone stands for a stripped-down, modular server built to use as little space and energy as possible. The short form fits the hardware itself: many thin units slide side by side into a shared rack. Administrators speak of swapping, adding or losing a blade as easily as a whole machine.

Phoneticians map the front of the tongue closely and separate the very tip from the stretch just behind it. Consonants made with that stretch are called laminal. In description, the word nearly always appears as "the blade of the tongue", so it is not confused with any other blade in the body or the mouth.

The word for a swaggering young man was not always admiring. The Universal Songster of 1832 mocks "blust'ring blades" who are "Jerry Sneaks at home." Coleridge and Southey use it for a troublesome rogue. Today it survives mainly in the phrase young blades, used by historians such as Amanda Vickery to describe the past, so in modern speech it sounds deliberately old-fashioned.

Professional wrestling has its own word for a secret cut. Unlike the stabbing verb, the injury here is staged, made surreptitiously to draw visible blood and heighten the drama of a match. It is insider slang, and the person cut is usually the wrestler, as in "he bladed himself."

Ultimate players name this throw after the angle of release. The disc is tipped steeply onto its edge, so it slices through a tight, high arc and drops sharply instead of floating. It is the throw to describe when the disc comes down fast and steep, rather than gliding flat toward the receiver.

This builder's term is usually met in the plural, because the principal rafters come in pairs that meet at the ridge. It names the main load-bearing timbers of a roof, not the lighter rafters laid between them. It is especially common in descriptions of cruck frames, where two curved blades form the whole skeleton of the building.

This is slang of the United States, and it is easy to misread. In older writing, a man called a blade is far more often the dashing young man, so only context shows which meaning is intended. Because the word is slang about sexuality, it belongs to informal or reported speech, not neutral description.

Street slang of the United States, usually used with the definite article: the blade is the stretch where prostitution happens. It belongs to the vocabulary of street life and policing. In ordinary prose, a phrase like "red-light district" is the neutral alternative.

Singers use the word to describe focus, not volume: "He wasn't loud, but his voice had lots of blade." It takes no plural and usually follows have, lack or with, so a voice has blade or sings with blade. It is praised most often in countertenors, whose clear, ringing sound is valued for exactly this quality.

This is a poet's verb, and it rarely leaves verse. Phineas Fletcher's "Elisa" (1633) rhymes it with faded, describing a flower "as fair... as ever in the Muses' garden bladed." It takes no object: a field or plant simply blades. Outside poetry, sprout or come up is the natural choice.

A shell-trade term with an exact count behind it: nine large plates, four on the sides and five down the middle of a sea turtle's carapace. The smaller plates around them are not blades. Despite the name, the prized tortoiseshell cut from these plates comes from the sea turtle, not from a tortoise, and the blades were the best grade of it.