star shell
- noun
- Specialized
:
proyectil de estrella
- - The ship was firing star shells.
Examples
-
Position maybe ten miles due east of you... but a star shell will help confirm.
-
More star shells.
-
The troops relied on the star shell to light up the dark battlefield during the night.
-
During the military exercise, the commander ordered the troops to launch a star shell to illuminate the area.
-
As the night fell, the soldiers fired a star shell to make it easier to spot enemy movements.
Surface Forms
Morphology
This is a straightforward noun–noun compound where 'star' modifies 'shell' to indicate a shell that produces a star-like light. A B1 learner who knows 'star' (bright object/light) and 'shell' (projectile) can reasonably infer it is a type of shell that emits bright light, so the basic meaning is directly recoverable from the constituents and common composition patterns.
Etymology
Star shell comes from the sight of a military shell that bursts in the sky and releases a bright, star-like light. Because the burst looks like a glowing star, soldiers began to call it a star shell, and it now means 'a shell that lights an area at night'.
