side arm

Questions about side arm

What does side arm mean?

side arm means "a firearm that is held and fired with one hand".

What is another word for side arm?

Close synonyms include pistol, handgun, shooting iron. 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 side arm a common word?

side arm is banded "Uncommon" — turns up in careful writing rather than conversation. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.