The Collaborative International Dictionary
Fer-de-lance \Fer`-de-lance"\, n. [F., the iron of a lance, lance head.] (Zo["o]l.) A large, venomous serpent ( Trigonocephalus lanceolatus) of Brazil and the West Indies. It is allied to the rattlesnake, but has no rattle.
Wiktionary
n. (taxlink Bothrops lanceolatus species noshow=1) or other lancehead snakes of genus ''Bothrops''.
WordNet
n. large extremely venomous pit viper of Central America and South America [syn: Bothrops atrops]
Wikipedia
Fer-de-Lance is French for spearhead (literally "iron of the lance"), and may refer to:
Snakes of the genus Bothrops, especially:
- B. lanceolatus, the Martinique lancehead snake (some apply "fer-de-lance" to this species only)
- B. caribbaeus, the Saint Lucia lancehead
- B. atrox, the common lancehead, native to tropical South America east of the Andes and to Trinidad
- B. asper, the terciopelo or Central American lancehead, native to Central and northwestern South America
Other:
- Fer-de-Lance (novel), a 1934 Nero Wolfe series novel by Rex Stout
- Fer-de-Lance (comics), Teresa Vasquez, a Marvel comics super-villain
- Fer-de-Lance (film) a 1974 film starring David Janssen
- A class of spaceship from the seminal 1984 computer game Elite. Fer-de-Lance has returned in the new MMORPG, Elite: Dangerous
- A sports car in the Xbox 360 game Saint's Row
Fer-de-Lance (Teresa Vasquez) is a fictional super villain appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics.
Fer-de-Lance is the first Nero Wolfe detective novel written by Rex Stout, published in 1934 by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. The novel appeared in abridged form in The American Magazine (November 1934) under the title "Point of Death." The novel was adapted for the 1936 movie Meet Nero Wolfe. In his seminal 1941 work, Murder for Pleasure, crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft included Fer-de-Lance in his definitive list of the most influential works of mystery fiction.
Usage examples of "fer-de-lance".
My first thought was that Wolfe had got the funny notion that I needed all that army to subdue the fer-de-lance, as I had decided to call Manuel Kimball instead of the spiggoty, but of course Wolfe knew me too well for that.
It was a good day for the finale of the fer-de-lance, I thought, the longest one of the year.
In her Zoo for Happiness one could find almost every known kind of a snake - enormous king cobras over twenty-five feet long, Egyptian cobras, adders, copperheads, vipers, Australian black snakes, green mambas, tiger snakes, fer-de-lances, moccasins, all varieties of rattlesnakes and many others.
So I told him what I'd learned: the hermetic seals, the quetzal feather, the fer-de-lance, the One Called Night, the Nothing.