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The English term "rapier" comes from the French rapière and appears both in English and German, near-simultaneously, in the mid-16th century, for a light, long, pointed two-edged sword. It is a loan from Middle French espee rapiere, first recorded in 1474, a nickname meaning ' grater '. [8]
The small sword or smallsword (also court sword, Gaelic: claidheamh beag or claybeg, French: épée de cour, lit. “Sword of the court”) is a light one-handed sword designed for thrusting which evolved out of the longer and heavier rapier (espada ropera) of the late Renaissance.
"Pariser" small sword, from which the French foil was derived. The modern foil is the training weapon for the small-sword, the common sidearm of 18th century gentleman. Rapier and even longsword foils are also known to have been used, but their weight and use were very different. [13] [14]
The term "rapier" appeared in the English lexicon via the French épée rapière which either compared the weapon to a rasp or file; it may be a corruption of "rasping sword" [39] which referred to the sound the blade makes [40] when it comes into contact with another blade. There is no historical Italian equivalent to the English word "rapier ...
The épée (/ ˈ ɛ p eɪ, ˈ eɪ-/, French:; lit. ' sword ' ), also rendered as epee in English, is the largest and heaviest of the three weapons used in the sport of fencing . The modern épée derives from the 19th-century épée de combat , [ 1 ] a weapon which itself derives from the French small sword .
A longsword (also spelled as long sword or long-sword) is a type of European sword characterized as having a cruciform hilt with a grip for primarily two-handed use (around 15 to 30 cm or 6 to 12 in), a straight double-edged blade of around 80 to 110 cm (31 to 43 in), and weighing approximately 2 to 3 kg (4 lb 7 oz to 6 lb 10 oz).
In the European High Middle Ages, the typical sword (sometimes academically categorized as the knightly sword, arming sword, or in full, knightly arming sword) was a straight, double-edged weapon with a single-handed, cruciform (i.e., cross-shaped) hilt and a blade length of about 70 to 80 centimetres (28 to 31 in).
The rapier is believed to have evolved either from the Spanish espada ropera or from the swords of the Italian nobility somewhere in the later part of the 16th century. [81] [82] The rapier differed from most earlier swords in that it was not