Skip to main content
Glite Dictionary
spring gun

spring gun

9.2
A hidden device set to shoot as a trap when someone touches or moves something near it
  • noun
  • /sprɪŋ ɡʌn/
  • NSFW
translation icon : pistola de resorte
  • The movie featured a scene where the protagonist narrowly avoided a hidden spring gun trap in the abandoned warehouse.

Thus, this case should be looked upon as one in which the law permits use of a spring gun.

Examples

  • To protect his garden from thieves, he set a spring gun rigged to a wire near the fence entrance.

  • They even have spring guns.

    Colonia (2015)

  • There was nothing left for me here, and I had been on my way somewhere when a spring gun shot a rubber severed head out in front of my boots.

    Fiction book (2000)

  • The brutal traps set to kill the moles are not very different, after all, from the spring guns and man-traps set to maim and kill human poachers and trespassers.

    Academic text (2017)

  • The old cabin was equipped with a spring gun that would shoot a dart when someone opened the door.

Synonyms

set gun
vsspring gun
  • NSFW
9.9

A hidden gun that fires as a trap when someone trips a wire

is the same device but expressed using a different term

Surface Forms

spring gun singular
spring guns plural

Morphology

spring + gun

The meaning is directly compositional: 'spring' (a coiled mechanical device) modifies 'gun', so a B1 learner who knows both words can infer a gun that fires by a spring or is spring-loaded, often used as a trap. This follows a common noun+noun compounding pattern and mirrors cross-linguistic ways of describing mechanically triggered devices, making the expression immediately comprehensible from its parts.

Etymology

Spring gun comes from a real trap: people would hide a gun on a simple spring or wire so that when someone touched or moved it the weapon would 'go off' by itself. So, spring gun means 'a gun set to fire automatically when someone triggers it'.