Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
Usage examples of "cannon-ball".
In the centre of the page was a picture of a tall man with shoulders wide as the crosstree of a gallows, and a bald cannon-ball head that shone in the bright African sunshine.
It ended in favour of Napoleon, but he and France paid dearly for it: while General Kirschner and Duroc were talking together the former was killed by a cannon-ball, which mortally wounded the latter in the abdomen.
But I had no special love of our puffed-up noblemen either, so I had been quietly amused by accounts in our newssheets of rampaging London apprentices showering these grand old homes with cannon-balls and grape-shot, then turning their pampered inhabitants into the fields before liberating the wine from their cellars and the gold leaf from the doors of their carriages.
Some of the naked men ran to the crest to see that a nine-pounder had slammed a cannon-ball into a troop of French Cuirassiers who had been crossing the valley floor.
But Henry Rogers did not see the passer-by in whose delicate mind a point of taste had thus vanquished curiosity, for his thoughts had flown far across the pale-blue sky, behind the cannon-ball clouds, up into that scented space and distance where summer was already winging her radiant way towards the earth.
One of the other two Ceylonese put a cannon-ball into Looney's hands, and be clasped it to his naked chest.
In half a minute Mrs Cratchit entered - flushed, but smiling proudly - with the pudding, like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top.
He was a huge rock of a man dressed in a reefer jacket with a peaked cap that looked several sizes too small for him crammed on to his cannon-ball of a head.
During the first week the log had recorded the burial of fourteen convicts, the two remaining turnkeys, and a loblolly boy, all of whom had lived or worked forward, and it had recorded them in Needham's fine copperplate: now it was Jack's far rougher hand that wrote the daily list, for his clerk had gone over the side with two cannon-balls to carry him down and his hammock for a shroud, the first of those abaft the mast to die of the disease.