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dragoon - 6 dictionary results

dra⋅goon

  [druh-goon]
Use dragoon in a Sentence
–noun
1. (esp. formerly) a European cavalryman of a heavily armed troop.
2. a member of a military unit formerly composed of such cavalrymen, as in the British army.
3. (formerly) a mounted infantryman armed with a short musket.
–verb (used with object)
4. to set dragoons or soldiers upon; persecute by armed force; oppress.
5. to force by oppressive measures; coerce: The authorities dragooned the peasants into leaving their farms.
Origin:
1615–25; < F dragon, special use of dragon dragon, applied first to a pistol hammer (so named because of its shape), then to the firearm, then to the troops so armed

Related forms:
dra⋅goon⋅age, noun
Dictionary.com Unabridged
Based on the Random House Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2009.
Cite This Source Link To dragoon
dra·goon   (drə-gōōn', drā-)   
n.  A member of a European military unit trained and armed to fight mounted or on foot.
tr.v.   dra·gooned, dra·goon·ing, dra·goons
  1. To subjugate or persecute by the imposition of troops.
  2. To compel by violent measures or threats; coerce.

[French dragon, carbine, dragoon, from Old French, dragon; see dragon.]
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Dragoon

Dra*goon"\ (dr[.a]*g[=oo]n"), n. [F. dragon dragon, dragoon, fr. L. draco dragon, also, a cohort's standard (with a dragon on it). The name was given from the sense standard. See Dragon.]

1. ((Mil.) Formerly, a soldier who was taught and armed to serve either on horseback or on foot; now, a mounted soldier; a cavalry man.

2. A variety of pigeon. --Clarke.

Dragoon bird (Zo["o]l.), the umbrella bird.

Dragoon

Dra*goon"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. Dragooned; p. pr. & vb. n. Dragooning.]

1. To harass or reduce to subjection by dragoons; to persecute by abandoning a place to the rage of soldiers.

2. To compel submission by violent measures; to harass; to persecute.

The colonies may be influenced to anything, but they can be dragooned to nothing. --Price.

Lewis the Fourteenth is justly censured for trying to dragoon his subjects to heaven. --Macaulay.
Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
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dragoon 
1622, from Fr. dragon "carbine, musket," because the guns the soldiers carried "breathed fire" like a dragon. The verb is from 1689, lit. "to force by the agency of dragoons" (which were used by the Fr. kings to persecute Protestants).
Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2001 Douglas Harper
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DRAGOON language
A distributed, concurrent, object-oriented Ada-based language developed in the Esprit DRAGON project by Colin Atkinson at Imperial College in 1989 (Now at University of Houston, Clear Lake). DRAGOON supports object-oriented programming for embeddable systems and is presently implemented as an Ada preprocessor.
["Object-Oriented Reuse, Concurrency and Distribution: An Ada-Based Approach", C. Atkinson, A-W 1991, ISBN 0-2015-6-5277].
(1999-11-22)

The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, © 1993-2007 Denis Howe
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