.38 S&W
revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson (S&W)
The .38 S&W, also commonly known as .38 S&W Short (referred to as such to differentiate it from .38 Long Colt and .38 Special), 9×20mmR, .38 Colt NP (New Police), or .38/200, is a rimmed, centerfire revolver cartridge developed by Smith & Wesson in 1877. Versions of the cartridge were the standard revolver cartridges of the British military from 1922 to 1963, in Webley, Enfield, and Smith & Wesson revolvers. Though similar in name, it is not interchangeable with the later .38 Special due to a different case shape and slightly larger bullet diameter.
History
The round was first introduced in 1877 for use in the S&W .38 Single Action. As standard for the era, it featured heeled bullet with the same diameter of bullet and case neck equal to .38 inch; later versions discarded the feature and downsized the bullet, but the designation did not change.
After World War I, the British military sought to replace pre-war revolvers with easier-to-handle weapons. Webley demonstrated a lighter version of their Mk III revolver with modified .38 S&W ammunition, firing a heavy 200-grain (13 g) bullet. It received favorable reports, and the revolver was accepted in principle.
As Webley had used the .38 S&W cartridge dimensions for their revolver, and the cartridge length was fixed by the size of the cylinder of the revolver (the same as for the wider .455), Kynoch produced a cartridge with the same dimensions as the .38 S&W but with 2.8 grains (0.18 g) of "Neonite" nitrocellulose powder and a 200 grain (13.0 g) bullet. In tests performed on cadavers and live animals, it was found that the lead bullet, being overly long and heavy for its calibre, become unstable after penetrating the target, somewhat increasing target effect.
“.38 S&W” enters the record as revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson (S&W). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what revolver, cartridge and designed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q158764. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1877, 1922 and 1963.
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This entry incorporates text from “.38 S&W” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.