hand-grenade

plural hand-grenades

1. alternativeAlternative form of hand grenade.

   ‘A hand-grenade. One of those potato-mashers. It just blew the whole side of my foot off.’

   1929 May–October, Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1st British edition, London: Jonathan Cape […], published 1929, →OCLC, book II, page 131

   3 more examples

   The bullet-proof shutters, the stacks of hand-grenades, and the Gatling guns of the Sub-Treasury are tacit admissions of the fact and of the quality of the mercy expected.

   1890, Jacob A[ugust] Riis, “The Awakening”, in How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York, New York, N.Y.: Charles Scribner’s Sons, →OCLC, page 20

   I went back in and threw a hand-grenade under the bed and then I brassed up the house. They were dead, of course.

   1987, Stuart Rintoul, Ashes of Vietnam: Australian voices, page 126

   But what could Croatian chimney-sweeper Marko have been thinking by using a hand-grenade as a weight for his broom and then turning on his welding apparatus in the cleaning process?

   2006 January 29, [Bill] Brownstein, “Man loses detonator roulette”, in The Gazette, page B2, column 2