ballista

Other forms of ballista

plural

ballistae

Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.

Questions about ballista

What does ballista mean?

ballista means "an engine that provided medieval artillery used during sieges; a heavy war engine for hurling large stones and other missiles".

How many syllables are in ballista?

ballista has 3 syllables and divides as bal-li-sta under the regular spelling rules. It is not in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary, so that comes from how the word is written rather than from a recorded pronunciation, and no stress or phonetic transcription is claimed for it.

What is another word for ballista?

Close synonyms include catapult, arbalest, arbalist, bricole, mangonel. Each sense on this page lists its own synonyms, because a word with several meanings rarely has one substitute that works for all of them.

Is ballista a common word?

ballista is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.