Find the word definition

Crossword clues for flak

Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
flak
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
flak jacket
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ NOUN
jacket
▪ Tucking himself into a ball of boots and flak jacket, the Squat bounced and rolled half a dozen times.
▪ Primo notices his dark swollen belly, pushing out between the flaps of a green flak jacket.
▪ All the officers involved in the operation were armed and wore flak jackets.
▪ Throughout the campaign troops have been issued with various flak jackets which give a degree of protection against low velocity rounds.
▪ The police donned flak jackets of laminated kevlar and webbing belts with pouches for spare magazines and stun grenades.
▪ The shoulders were padded like a flak jacket, with fringed epaulettes.
■ VERB
take
▪ I smiled some more and took the flak as the lady was forced to wait.
▪ It's all or nothing and being strong enough to take the flak if things go wrong.
▪ Baker, despite his 17 goals, has taken some flak from fans at the Victoria Ground.
▪ But it was Sarah who was left to take the flak.
▪ He'd have to take the flak for having a lift with Mrs Wright.
▪ Streisand took the flak and Twentieth Century-Fox executives braced themselves for a financial disaster.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Anyway, you can see I feel confused about it still, because I couldn't face the flak from your friends.
▪ I smiled some more and took the flak as the lady was forced to wait.
▪ Nor should he get all the union flak for doing exactly what he was hired to do.
▪ We descended down as the flak, which caused us no major problems, opened up.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
flak

1938, "anti-aircraft gun," from German Flak, condensed from Fliegerabwehrkanone, literally "pilot warding-off cannon." Sense of "anti-aircraft fire" is from 1940; metaphoric sense of "criticism" is c.1963 in American English. Flak jacket is by 1956.

Wiktionary
flak

n. 1 Ground-based anti-aircraft guns firing explosive shells. 2 Anti-aircraft shell fire. 3 (context figuratively informal English) Adverse criticism.

WordNet
flak
  1. n. a slick spokesperson who can turn any criticism to the advantage of their employer [syn: flak catcher, flack catcher, flack]

  2. intense adverse criticism; "Clinton directed his fire at the Republican Party"; "the government has come under attack"; "don't give me any flak" [syn: fire, attack, flack, blast]

  3. artillery designed to shoot upward at airplanes [syn: antiaircraft, antiaircraft gun, flack, pom-pom, ack-ack, ack-ack gun]

Wikipedia
Flak (disambiguation)

Flak typically refers to anti-aircraft guns, derived during World War II from the German FlugabwehrKanone, for "aircraft defence cannon". Original derived from 'Flugabwehrgeschütz'.

Flak may also refer to:

  • Flak (or Flack), an informal term for a media relations representative
  • Flak, a fictional character in Transformers
  • Flak jacket, protective clothing worn by soldiers and others to protect themselves from debris and shrapnel
  • Intense criticism, a metaphor derived from intense anti-aircraft gunfire; e.g. "I'll have to take the flak for my department's mistakes."
  • " Flak", a class of the Propaganda model advanced by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
  • "Flat land" or "flat sandbank", as a component of Germanic language area place names, e.g. Flakfortet
  • Flak Magazine, an American online magazine, founded in 1998
  • Flak, an 8-bit computer game published in 1984 by Funsoft
  • Flak, a UK band whose music has featured in Malcolm in the Middle
  • Flak, a fictional commanding officer in the video game Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising
  • F.L.A.K., a fictional weapon in the G.I. Joe universe
  • Flak, a powerful weapon in the video game FTL (Faster Than Light)
FlaK

FlaK may refer to:

  • Preflagellin peptidase, an enzyme
  • Anti-aircraft warfare, another term for naval air defense
Flak (Transformers)

Flak is a fictional character from the various Transformers universes.

Usage examples of "flak".

Even a sneeze from a nervous gunner was enough to send a bomber into violent evasive aerobatics and like most pilots he feared mid-air collision more than flak and night fighters put together.

Flak, with the German cities merely playing the role of the unfortunate recipients of the bombs dropped by those bombers which had evaded the German defence.

He lunged forward over the bombsight to search downward through the plexiglass for some reassuring sign of Orr, who drew flak like a magnet and who had undoubtedly attracted the crack batteries of the whole Hermann Goering Division to Bologna overnight from wherever the hell they had been stationed the day before when Orr was still in Rome.

Bologna straight and level with my head in the bombsight and listen to all that flak pumping away all around me.

The other two losses fell to the Flak batteries of Wilhelmshaven and Bremerhaven when the bombers concerned strayed and flew near those strongly defended cities.

Staging Area Fagin was standing under a high arc light and watching his marshals suiting up Banish in a BDU, a battle dress uniform, black fatigues and a flak jacket and bullet-proof helmet.

We had the target buttoned up, and he was hedgehopping in that little kite, jinxing in the flak and taking quick squirts at foam.

That was where he wanted to be if he had to be there at all, instead of hung out there in front like some goddam cantilevered goldfish in some goddam cantilevered goldfish bowl while the goddam foul black tiers of flak were bursting and booming and billowing all around and above and below him in a climbing, cracking, staggered, banging, phantasmagorical, cosmological wickedness that jarred and tossed and shivered, clattered and pierced, and threatened to annihilate them all in one splinter of a second in one vast flash of fire.

He took a number of photostats out of a large red expansion envelope he had been hiding conspicuously beneath a leather flight jacket painted garishly with pictures of airplanes flying through orange bursts of flak and with orderly rows of little bombs signifying fifty-five combat missions flown.

While he was wondering how he was going to get into Ford Island through the flak, and thinking that, if this were target practice, every safety precaution he knew was being violated, one of the Army planes he had noticed broke away from the others and swept down on him.

And the flak was just set up so they knew what line the airplanes would come to bomb that thing and the flak was just set to shoot at them.

We were sleeping with most of our kit on anyway, but it was a major embuggerance to have to pull on your boots, flak jacket, and helmet and leg it down to the slit trenches.

We were wearing nylon flak jackets on which each bloke had written his blood group.

And we had complete suprise, which was just as well, seeing as we lost about a fifth of our strength to their flak before we hit the ground.

At that moment, too, she heard off in the distance the low throbbing of planes, the muffled booming of explosions and the sharp staccato of quick-firing flak batteries.