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WordNet
tracer bullet

n. ammunition whose flight can be observed by a trail of smoke [syn: tracer]

Wikipedia
Tracer Bullet

Tracer Bullet may refer to:

  • Tracer ammunition, bullets that are built with a small pyrotechnic charge in their base
  • Tracer Bullet, a fictional detective, alter ego of Calvin in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes
  • A term used in Scrum (software development) to describe a proof-of-concept deliverable
  • Pathfinder (library science) - a term for those pathfinders produced by the Library of Congress.

Usage examples of "tracer bullet".

He saw the leg break off like a wooden stick where the tracer bullet hit it dead centre, and saw the trouser leg catch fire suddenly.

Like a tracer bullet, the light flashed from the auto to the fire truck.

A tracer bullet streaked past his face, and he tripped and fell over mangled bodies, but he got up again and kept going.

The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the earth all the way into the stratosphere, by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it.

The machine pistol was charged every third cartridge with a tracer bullet, and a grayish thread seemed to stretch from the muzzle to the distant palm, where a shower of cocoanuts were kicked down.

A tracer bullet from an M-16 hit him square in the jaw and exited out his left ear.

This was more tracer bullet fire, when the panicked men by the exit tended to surge out away from the outgoing doors.

The fireball coalesced and then quite suddenly it leaped off the earth all the way into the stratosphere, by God, like a tracer bullet leaving a machine-gun, trailing a whitish pillar of smoke behind it.

The fiery pain in my shoulder shot up into my neck like a tracer bullet.

Private Prescott was killed by a stray German tracer bullet before he managed to reach the safety of his own trenches.

He missed the motorcycle tire, with both shots, but the fifth and last one in his revolver was always a tracer bullet, since one night he had been caught shooting in the dark.

He knew that hy- drogen was volatile, but unless he was using a tracer bullet, combustion was unlikely.

He steadied a rifle on a rusted plate and cracked a thirty-caliber misch-metal tracer bullet into the bright little target.