What's the difference between halberd and poleaxe?
Halberd
Definition:
(n.) An ancient long-handled weapon, of which the head had a point and several long, sharp edges, curved or straight, and sometimes additional points. The heads were sometimes of very elaborate form.
Example Sentences:
(1) There was an audible intake of breath as a slide came up showing the base of his skull sliced off by one terrible blow, believed to be from a halberd, a fearsome medieval battle weapon with a razor-sharp iron axe blade weighing about two kilos, mounted on a wooden pole, which was swung at Richard at very close range.
(2) The skull lay with the largely undamaged face up – itself a significant and sinister point, according to the experts, hiding the savage blow to the base from a halberd, a fearsome medieval pike-like weapon, which sliced through bone and into the brain and would have killed him in seconds.
Poleaxe
Definition:
(n.) Anciently, a kind of battle-ax with a long handle; later, an ax or hatchet with a short handle, and a head variously patterned; -- used by soldiers, and also by sailors in boarding a vessel.
Example Sentences:
(1) The Child Poverty Action Group lists occupations whose incomes will be poleaxed: a nursery nurse loses £1,788, a hospital porter £2,011, a care worker £1,906.
(2) Guided by Vikki, in a voice that was part nursery school teacher, part hypnotist, exercises like “the scan”, where you focus on different parts of your body from the crown of your head to the tops on your toes, left me poleaxed, and a convert to more restorative forms of yoga.
(3) The West Ham goalkeeper could have no complaints after poleaxing the Leicester striker.
(4) Capital spending was poleaxed, storing up a public squalor deficit for the future that will need to be repaid as surely as the fiscal deficit.
(5) Weekend reports from Westminster sought to suggest that, even if David Cameron's enemies aren't preparing the poleaxe quite yet, they are sharpening their stilettos.
(6) She said: ‘Allison.’ I said: ‘When did you come here?’ She said: ‘I came yesterday.’” Then came a question that poleaxed him.
(7) But if things go too wrong for too long, then, as Churchill famously put it, "he must be poleaxed".
(8) Standing outside the courtroom in this bright, modern legal centre, he came across as a man in shock, poleaxed by the allegations of domestic abuse, furious that his children had been taken hundreds of miles away from what had been their family home, but also frightened about what the court would say about his right to see them in the future.
(9) I couldn’t move for about five minutes after the curtain call; I was just absolutely poleaxed with grief and sadness for this family and the sadness of life at times.
(10) But no one quite knew what was happening that first night - December 3 1947 - except that they had been poleaxed.