.38 Special
revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson
The .38 Special, also commonly known as .38 S&W Special (not to be confused with .38 S&W), .38 Smith & Wesson Special, .38 Spl, .38 Spc (pronounced "thirty-eight special"), or 9×29mmR is a rimmed, centerfire cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson, and introduced in 1898.
The .38 Special was the standard service cartridge for most United States police departments from the 1920s to the 1990s. It was also a common sidearm cartridge used by United States military personnel in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. In other parts of the world, it is known by its metric designation of 9×29.5mmR or 9.1×29mmR.
Known for its accuracy and manageable recoil, the .38 Special remains one of the most popular revolver cartridges in the world more than a century after its introduction. It is used for recreational target shooting, formal target competition, personal defense, and small-game hunting.
Overview
The .38 Special was designed and entered production in 1898 as an improvement over the .38 Long Colt which, as a military service cartridge, was found to have inadequate stopping power against the charges of Filipino Muslim warriors during the Philippine–American War. Upon its introduction, the .38 Special was originally loaded with black powder, but the cartridge's popularity caused manufacturers to offer smokeless powder loadings within a year of its introduction.
Despite its name, the caliber of the .38 Special cartridge is actually .357 inches (36 caliber/9.07 mm), with the ".38" referring to the approximate diameter of the loaded brass case. This came about because the original 38-caliber cartridge, the .38 Short Colt, was designed for use in converted .36-caliber cap-and-ball Navy revolvers, which had untapered cylindrical firing chambers of approximately 0.374-inch (9.5 mm) diameter that required heeled bullets, the exposed portion of which was the same diameter as the cartridge case.
Except for case length, the .38 Special is identical to the .38 Short Colt, .38 Long Colt, and .357 Magnum.
“.38 Special” enters the record as revolver cartridge designed by Smith & Wesson. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Special, revolver and cartridge can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q24634. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “.38 Special” 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.