Claymore
type of sword
A claymore (; from Scottish Gaelic: claidheamh-mòr, "great sword") is either the Scottish variant of the late medieval two-handed sword or the Scottish variant of the basket-hilted sword. The former is characterised as having a cross hilt of forward-sloping quillons with quatrefoil terminations and was in use from the 15th to 17th centuries.
The word claymore was first used in reference to basket-hilted swords during the 18th century in Scotland and parts of England. This description was maybe not used during the 17th century, when basket-hilted swords were the primary military swords across Europe, but these basket-hilted, broad-bladed swords remained in service with officers of Scottish regiments into the 21st century. After the Acts of Union in 1707 (when Scottish and English regiments were integrated together), the swords were seen as a mark of distinction by Scottish officers over the more slender sabres used by their English contemporaries: a symbol of physical strength and prowess, and a link to the historic Highland way of life.
Terminology
The term claymore is an anglicisation of the Gaelic claidheamh-mòr "big/great sword", attested in 1772 (as Cly-more) with the gloss "great two-handed sword". The sense "basket-hilted sword" is contemporaneous, attested in 1773 as "the broad-sword now used ... called the Claymore, (i.e., the great sword)", although OED observes that this usage is "inexact, but very common". The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica likewise judged that the term is "wrongly" applied to the basket-hilted sword.
Countering this view, Paul Wagner and Christopher Thompson argue that the term "claymore" was applied first to the basket-hilted broadsword, and then to all Scottish swords.
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This entry incorporates text from “Claymore” 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.