Swordlength

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A distance equal to the length of a sword.

    "All danger of that, however—which (though of course I should have done it unhesitatingly,) would have been not a little disagreeable in a country where respectability is measured by swordlengths just as silk is by yardlengths—is entirely over."

Example

More examples

"All danger of that, however—which (though of course I should have done it unhesitatingly,) would have been not a little disagreeable in a country where respectability is measured by swordlengths just as silk is by yardlengths—is entirely over."

Etymology

From sword + length. Compare Middle English swerde-length, swerd lengthe.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.