glaive

Illustration of a glaive-guisarme

A glaive is a polearm consisting of a single-edged blade on the end of a pole. It is similar to the Japanese naginata and the Chinese Guan Dao. However, instead of having a tang like a sword or naginata, the blade is affixed in a socket-shaft configuration similar to an axe head. Typically, the blade was around 45 cm (18 inches) long, on the end of a pole 2 m (6 or 7 feet) long. Occasionally glaive blades were created with a small hook on the reverse side to better catch riders. Such blades are called glaive-guisarmes.

According to the 1599 treatise Paradoxes of Defense by the English gentleman George Silver, the glaive is used in the same general manner as the quarterstaff, half pike, bill, halberd, voulge, or partisan. Silver rates this class of polearms above all other individual hand-to-hand combat weapons.

Other uses

The word glaive has historically been given to several very different types of weapon.

• The word glaive originated in French. Almost all etymologists derive it from either the Latin (gladius) or Celtic (*cladivos, cf. claymore) word for sword. Nevertheless, all the earliest attestations in both French and English refer to spears.^[1] It is attested in this meaning in English roughly from the 14th century to the 16th.^[2]
• In the 15th century it acquired the meaning described above.^[3]
• Around the same time it also began being used as a poetic word for sword (this is the main use of the word in Modern French).^[4]
• In the film Krull as well as the video game Dark Sector and Dungeon Siege II the word 'glaive' is used to refer to a whirling projectile blade similar in structure to a shuriken but much larger and cast and used like a chakram (a weapon much like a frisbee) or hunga munga.

Notes

1. ^ OED s.v. Glaive: "Hatz-Darm. regard OF. glaive as an adapted form of L. gladius (through the stages gladie, glaie, glavie). Ascoli supposes it to represent a Celtic *cladivo- (OIr. claideb sword, Gael. claidheamh). Neither view, however, accounts for the earliest meaning of the word in OF., which is also that of MHG. glavîe, glævîn, MDu. glavie, glaye, Sw. glaven."
2. ^ OED s.v., section 1, lists examples in this meaning from 1297–1592.
3. ^ OED s.v., section 2, lists examples in this meaning from ca. 1450–1678.
4. ^ OED s.v., section 3, lists examples in this meaning from ca. 1470–1887.