bombardement

Bombardment comes from French bombardement, from bombarder (to bombard), from bombarde, a medieval cannon. Bombarde itself traces to Latin bombus, from Greek bombos, meaning 'a deep humming or buzzing sound.' The earliest cannons — large, crude, and unreliable — made a distinctive low humming sound before they fired, as the lit fuse traveled along the touch hole. The buzzing preceded the blast.

The bombarde was one of the first gunpowder weapons in Europe, appearing in the fourteenth century. It was a large-bore, short-barreled weapon that fired stone balls. The Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453 used enormous bombardes — the most famous, built by a Hungarian engineer named Orban, reportedly fired balls weighing over 500 kilograms. The bombardment of Constantinople's walls was the event that proved gunpowder weapons could defeat any fortification.

By the eighteenth century, bombardment had become the standard military term for sustained artillery fire directed at a fixed target — a city, a fortress, a defensive position. The bombardment of Fort McHenry in 1814 inspired Francis Scott Key to write 'The Star-Spangled Banner.' The bombardment of Paris by Prussian forces in 1870–1871 lasted four months. The word carried the weight of each event.

Modern bombardment is aerial as much as artillery-based. The bombing of Dresden (1945), the B-52 strikes of Vietnam, the 'shock and awe' campaign over Baghdad (2003) — all are bombardments. The word has expanded from artillery to include any sustained attack from any source on any target. The medieval buzzing is long gone. The word that named the sound of an early cannon now names the sound of a guided missile.