lightning bolt

plural lightning bolts

1. A single, visible discharge of lightning.

   Shortly after dinner one day — it was a hot summer afternoon — a very severe thunderstorm broke out over the city and after it had lasted some ten to fifteen minutes an exceptionally bright lightning bolt flashed through the air followed immediately by a terrific crash of thunder.

   1913, Popular Electricity and the World's Advance, page 192

2. A conventional representation of a lightning bolt as a zigzag line.
3. A conventional representation of a lightning bolt in heraldry or in artistic depictions of thunder gods, for example as a winged and barbed torch.
4. figurativelySomething that shocks or energizes, especially something that does so suddenly.

   She'd found her lightning bolt, but he didn't want her.

   2012, Trisha David, Falling For Jack, →ISBN

   2 more examples

   In this sense there was an uncomfortable similarity between the lettre de cachet, the “lightning bolt of despotism,” and the people that judged, not like a court of law, but like a force of nature.

   2011, Mary Ashburn Miller, A Natural History of Revolution, →ISBN

   In Conte Chelsea have something different, a manager who inherited a messy, enervated squad fresh from the worst title defence in 25 years and threw a lightning bolt through pretty much the same group of players to create a fresh champion team.

   2017 May 13, Barney Ronay, “Antonio Conte’s brilliance has turned Chelsea’s pop-up team into champions”, in the Guardian