What exactly is a "petard"?

Question

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Answer 1

Dear Cecil:

"Hoist by my own petard"--everybody says it, and so do I. But neither I, nor anyone else I've ever heard employ this particular cliche, has the slightest idea of what a "petard" is.

The one plausible explanation I've come across holds that a petard was a sort of 19th-century animal trap, a rope and a bent branch arrangement that caught the desired beast by one leg and pulled it up into the air. Can you confirm or deny? --Robert B., Chicago

Dear Robert:

Absolutely.

Oh, you mean I was supposed to pick one? Guess it's gotta be deny, then. The line comes from Shakespeare, specifically Hamlet, act III, scene 4, lines 206 and 207: "For 'tis sport to have the engineer/ Hoist with his own petar...."

The Melancholy Dane is chuckling over the fate he has in store for his childhood comrades, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are plotting to have him killed. Deferring his existential crisis for a moment, Hamlet turns the plot on the plotters, substituting their names for his in the death warrant they carry from King Claudius.

He continues: "But I will delve one yard below their mines/ And blow them at the moon." The key word is "mines," as in "land mines," for that's what a petard is (or "petar," as Shakespeare puts it--people couldn't spell any better then than they do today.) A small explosive device designed to blow open barricaded doors and gates, the petard was a favorite weapon in Elizabethan times.

Hamlet was saying, figuratively of course, that he would bury his bomb beneath Rosencrantz and Guildenstern's and "hoist" them, i.e., "blow them at the moon." Dirty Harry couldn't have put it any better.

The word "petard," we note with a barely suppressed giggle, comes from the Middle French peter, which is derived in turn from the Latin peditum--the sense of which (heh, heh) is "to break wind." Which must mean either that the French had a serious gas problem in those days, or that the petard was of something less than nuclear impact.

Answer 2

A petard was a small medieval bomb used to blow up gates and walls when breaching fortifications.

Answer 3

http://www.answers.com/topic/petard

Answer 4

pe�tard �� (p-t�rd) KEY �

NOUN:

A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a gate or wall.

A loud firecracker.

Answer 5

From http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords...

A petard was a bell-shaped metal grenade typically filled with five or six pounds of gunpowder and set off by a fuse. Sappers dug a tunnel or covered trench up to a building and fixed the device to a door, barricade, drawbridge or the like to break it open. The bomb was held in place with a heavy beam called a madrier.

From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/p...

An explosive device formerly used in warfare to blow in a door or gate, form a breach in a wall, etc.  

A kind of firecracker.  

(initial capital letter) Also called Flying Dustbin. a British spigot mortar of World War II that fired a 40-pound (18 kg) finned bomb, designed to destroy pillboxes and other concrete obstacles.  

Hoist by or with one's own petard, hurt, ruined, or destroyed by the very device or plot one had intended for another.  

[Origin: 1590–1600; < MF, equiv. to pet(er) to break wind (deriv. of pet < L péditum a breaking wind, orig. neut. of ptp. of pédere to break wind) + -ard -ard]

Word History: The French used pétard, "a loud discharge of intestinal gas," for a kind of infernal engine for blasting through the gates of a city. "To be hoist by one's own petard," a now proverbial phrase apparently originating with Shakespeare's Hamlet (around 1604) not long after the word entered English (around 1598), means "to blow oneself up with one's own bomb, be undone by one's own devices." The French noun pet, "f**t," developed regularly from the Latin noun pēditum, from the Indo-European root *pezd-, "f**t."