gunfire

plural gunfires

1. uncountableusuallyShots from a gun or guns, typically creating loud report.

   Let's hide in the trees to avoid the gunfire.

   2 more examples

   Sergeant, direct your gunfire toward that copse of trees.

   When sensors record a gunlike noise in, say, Cape Town or Chicago, software analyzes it for the sonic signatures of gunfire, and within seconds Beisner and his team listen to those audio files and look at those recorded waveforms at their office in Newark, Calif.

   2019 June 8, Malia Wollan, “How to Tell Gunfire From Fireworks”, in The New York Times Magazine

2. uncountableusuallygovernmentThe use of gunpowder-type weapons, mainly cannon, as opposed to swords or bayonets.

   Killing people became much easier and faster once armies started using gunfire.

3. uncountableusuallygovernmentThe time of firing of the morning gun or the evening gun.

   The grand event on the 14th was the shooting for the second stage for the Queen's prize. This commenced punctually at gunfire in the morning : the men being divided into four squads at the long ranges on the north side of the common.

   1864, Edmund Burke, editor, The Annual Register; A review of public events at home and abroad, for the year 1863

   2 more examples

   Art. 33. All Plying boats, with the exception of two which are to be weekly appoin[t]ed by the Chief Commissary of Police and Harbour Master, and at gunfire in the evening to be placed in a tier alongside of the Quay or at a place to be pointed out by these Officers and fastened by a claim and a padlock, the key of which is to be kept by the Porter on duty or by the Police Guard who is to release them at gunfire in the morning.

   1851, W. Draper Bolton, Bolton's Mauritius almanac, and official directory

   I had just awoke at gun-fire (5 A.M.), when suddenly the thatch began to rustle and shake as if an army of cats were galloping over it, and immediately afterwards my bed shook too, so that for an instant I imagined myself back in New Guinea, in my fragile house, which shook when an old cock went to roost on the ridge; but remembering that I was now on a solid earthen floor, I said to myself, "Why, it's an earthquake," and lay still in the pleasing expectation of another shock; but none came, and this was the only earthquake I ever felt in Ternate.

   1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 9

4. slanguncountableusuallygovernmentTea, a cup of tea, especially one served early in the morning before first parade.

   They had only in them the rolled mattresses, the neatly piled bed-boards and the empty tea-buckets of the orderly-men, empied of their last gun-fire.

   1937, David Jones, In Parenthesis, I