minuteman

n.
An armed man pledged to be ready to fight on a minute's notice just before and during the Revolutionary War in the United States.

For more information on minuteman, visit Britannica.com.

Origin: 1774

Just a minute! That's how long it was supposed to take for an American patriot to leave his work, grab his firearm, and muster for duty. With the war for independence in the offing, in 1774 the Massachusetts legislature reformed its militia, removing officers sympathetic to the British and establishing seven regiments, each to be one-third "minute men" who were "to be ready at a minute's warning with a fortnight's provision, and ammunition and arms." Such were the men who were warned by Paul Revere on April 18, 1775, that the British were coming and who routed the British at the battles of Lexington and Concord the next day.

A few other colonial legislatures followed Massachusetts's example, but more important, it proclaimed to all the colonies an ideal of a citizen who was ready to drop everything and fight for independence at a moment's notice. Statues of minutemen and Minuteman National Historical Park in Lexington recall the inspirational value of the ideal.

Minuteman may be the first consciously coined Americanism. In addition to our sense of the patriotic, it appeals to our need to hurry, manifested in later American inventions like the steamboat and airplane, telegraph and television, instant replay and instant credit, microprocessors and microwave ovens, express checkout lanes and Fast Food (1954) drive-throughs.

The twentieth century revived the military use of minuteman as the name for an intercontinental ballistic missile developed by the U.S. Air Force and first tested in 1961. During a quarter century of the Cold War (1946), a thousand Minuteman missiles stood in silos in the United States, ready to fire at the Soviet Union with a moment's notice. Fortunately, unlike their American Revolution predecessors, they never were called to actual combat.

---

n. 1. pl. -men (in the period preceding and during the Revolutionary War) a member of a class of American militiamen who volunteered to be ready for service at a minute's notice.

2. slang (World War II) a person selling bonds and stamps in support of the war effort. The bonds' promotional posters depicted a heroic Revolutionary War minuteman.

2. (Minuteman) LGM-30 an intercontinental ballistic missile that is guided to its target by an all-inertial guidance and control system. It is equipped with nuclear warheads and designed for deployment in underground silos.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Note: click on a word meaning below to see its connections and related words.

The noun has one meaning:

Meaning #1: an American militiaman prior to the Revolutionary War

---

Minuteman Battery B00009	minuteman pro 320