The Collaborative International Dictionary
Molotov cocktail \Molotov cocktail\ n. A home-made incendiary device consisting of a bottle filled with gasoline, and a cloth wick. The wick is lighted, and the bottle thrown at a target, such as a vehicle, where it may shatter and spread intense flames over the vehicle, destroying or damaging it.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
1940, a term from Russo-Finnish War (used and satirically named by the Finns), from Molotov (from Russian molot "hammer") name taken by Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Skriabin (1890-1986), Soviet minister of foreign affairs 1939-1949.
Wiktionary
n. (alternative capitalization of Molotov cocktail English)
Wikipedia
A Molotov cocktail, also known as a petrol bomb, bottle bomb, poor man's grenade, fire bomb (not to be confused with an actual fire bomb) or just Molotov, is a generic name used for a variety of bottle-based improvised incendiary weapons. Due to the relative ease of production, Molotov cocktails have been used by street criminals, protesters, rioters, gangsters, urban guerrillas, irregular soldiers, or even regular soldiers that are short on equivalent military-issue weapons. They are primarily intended to set targets ablaze rather than instantly obliterate them.
Molotov Cocktail is a quarterly magazine published in South Africa. Molotov Cocktail is edited by James Sanders (initially with the help of Ronald Suresh Roberts, and later alone).
Usage examples of "molotov cocktail".
If enough of the Lizzars gather into a group, such as five or six, then use a Molotov cocktail on them.
Why, they threw it away, Lieutenant, and got bogged down in endless street fighting, where a man with a tommy gun is as good as a Lizard with an automatic rifle, and a man with a Molotov cocktail can put paid to a tank that would smash a dozen Shermans in the open without breaking a sweat.
Some of those people hadn't suffered anything at all that he knew of - the fellow with the Molotov cocktail, for instance.
He had been caught by a Molotov cocktail blast as he prepared to throw a grapnel, and for some seconds before his comrades had beaten out the flames he had been a human torch.
Logs that were still burning from the Molotov cocktail were thrown thirty feet across the yard.
From all I've heard, gas is the only thing that really does much against their tanks, unless somebody climbs on top and tosses a Molotov cocktail down a hatch.
A wide patch of skin at the rear of his left cheek was slightly chewed up where a Molotov cocktail had burned through his helmet fifteen years earlier in the Shuna campaign, before Skin reached anything like its current level of ability.
A Molotov cocktail arcs through the sky and impacts on the starboard side of the yacht, where it's not going to do much damage.