enfilade

Etymology

Borrowed from French enfilade.

Pronunciation

• Rhymes: -eɪd

Noun

enfilade (plural enfilades)

1. A line or straight passage, or the position of that which lies in a straight line.
   • 2015 January 4, Harry Mount, “Kings and queens – any other approach to history is boring [print version: Game of thrones, 3 January 2015, p. R22]”, in The Daily Telegraph (Review)‎:

     In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about people who know their world history as being able to look back through the millennia as an enfilade of rooms: Greece yields to Rome; Rome to the Byzantine Empire ... the Renaissance ... the British Empire ... America ... China. The same goes for people who can recite their kings and queens. British history clicks into a long enfilade of discrete, identifiable periods.

2. Gunfire directed along the length of a target.
3. (architecture) A series of doors that provide a vista when open.

Verb

enfilade (third-person singular simple present enfilades, present participle enfilading, simple past and past participle enfiladed)

1. (transitive) to rake something with gunfire
   • 1907, Harold Bindloss, chapter 30, in The Dust of Conflict‎:

     It was by his order the shattered leading company flung itself into the houses when the Sin Verguenza were met by an enfilading volley as they reeled into the calle.

Anagrams

• alfenide

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ɑ̃.fi.lad/

Noun

enfilade f (plural enfilades)

1. row or series (of houses)
2. (architecture) enfilade
3. enfilade (gunfire)
4. (chess) skewer

Further reading

• “enfilade” in le Trésor de la langue française informatisé (The Digitized Treasury of the French Language).