switch-blade

plural switch-blades

1. alternativeAlternative form of switchblade.

   Silas Mort was a back-stabber who favoured a switch-blade.

   2010, Michael Tanner, The Tinman's Farewell, →ISBN, page 116

   2 more examples

   As I listened to Stokely's words, cutting like a switch-blade, accusing the enemy as I had never heard him accused before, I admit that I felt the cathartic power of his speech.

   2011, Martin Klimke, The Other Alliance, →ISBN

   At least Tabitha had never threatened me with a switch-blade.

   2013, Darynda Jones, Death and the Girl He Loves, →ISBN, page 2

1. not comparableHaving a spring-loaded blade.

   Besides, if worse came to worst he had his pig-sticker— a beautiful switch-blade stiletto he'd scrounged off the body of a Latino after a gang war— in his back pocket.

   1991, Alan Rodgers; William Relling, Jr., New Life for the Dead, →ISBN, page 38

   2 more examples

   He carried this switch-blade style knife with him always and at any given moment, would flip it out to dart small holes into any nearby piece of wood—a tree, a board, the side of a house.

   2009, Mickey Hager, Cruelty, →ISBN, page 26

   He had a switch-blade knife in his boot that was carried for this kind of situation, but he was reluctant to cut himself loose from his chute until he had some idea how far it was to fall.

   2010, Bobby Neal Chapman, Bastion, →ISBN, page 1

present singular third person switch-blades · participle present switch-blading · participle past switch-bladed · past switch-bladed

1. alternativeAlternative form of switchblade.

   My dick switch-bladed up and I jerked away.

   2008, Drew Ferguson, The Screwed Up Life of Charlie The Second, →ISBN

   3 more examples

   Richard Beymer, as Nick Adams, had last been seen on the screen being switch-bladed to death in West Side Story (UA, 1961).

   1981, Frank M. Laurence, Hemingway and the movies, page 167

   And to the west, a faint, somber, Sabbath tolling away and then a train's whistle crying down a long-ago-gone switch-blading track (like that streaking scar on old man Dickson's face).

   2001, Leon Forrest, There Is a Tree More Ancient Than Eden, →ISBN, page 43

   And the fist of my bloody right hand coming down hard and well-deep into the pit of my stomach and howling as if death's mothering-birthing switch-blading force had sliced across my face, as i did come from up underneath the bed and stood in all of my nakedness before my mother's body-length mirror, locked away in the enframing reflection as my bloody hands clasped away at my loins and i crumbled upon the floor rising and falling raising and falling and rising and falling.

   2010, Keith E. Byerman, Fingering the Jagged Grain: Tradition and Form in Recent Black Fiction, →ISBN