The Collaborative International Dictionary
Battering-ram \Bat"ter*ing-ram`\, n.
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(Mil.) An engine used in ancient times to beat down the walls of besieged places.
Note: It was a large beam, with a head of iron, which was sometimes made to resemble the head of a ram. It was suspended by ropes to a beam supported by posts, and so balanced as to swing backward and forward, and was impelled by men against the wall.
--Grose. A blacksmith's hammer, suspended, and worked horizontally.
Usage examples of "battering-ram".
But the walls of the city withstood the strokes of their battering-rams: and the besiegers pitched their tents on the neighboring mountain of Jaushan.
Emmanuel also, when he had thus set forwards to go to recover the town of Mansoul, took with him, at the commandment of his Father, fifty-four battering-rams, and twelve slings to whirl stones withal.
Then was an alarm sounded, and the battering-rams were played, and the slings did whirl stones into the town amain, and thus the battle began.
Giant catapults that could smash down the walls of a castle, battering-rams to breach any gate.
Suppose the Bounders brought a length of steel beam, and used it for a battering-ram?
It may be That, with a haughty and unwavering faith In their own battering-rams of argument, They deemed our buoyance whelmed, and sapped, and sunk To our hope's sheer bottom, whence a miracle Was all could friend and float us.
They had hardly gone any distance down the tunnel when a blow smote the side of the Mountain like the crash of battering-rams made of forest oaks and swung by giants.
A friendly tribe, instructed (I know not how) in the art of sieges, supplied him with a train of battering-rams and military engines, with a body of five hundred artificers.
It prances straight up to the lieutenant and kicks him a couple of times, knocking him flat on his ass, then bends his long neck down, shrieks in his face, and runs back into the jungle, using its head-bone as a kind of battering-ram to clear a path through the brush.
They are carried in the right fist, easily, and are flexible and light, used for thrusting, not the battering-ram effect of the heavy lances of Europe’.