rafale
noun
rafale is a noun meaning “A short, intense burst of artillery fire from a number of weapons fired with the intention of overwhelming resistance or routing an attacking force” (English Wiktionary, September 2026). It is spelled R-A-F-A-L-E and has 2 syllables, and it appears about once in every 4 million words in written English (wordfreq, 2021 data). The plural of rafale is rafales.
What does rafale mean?
noun
- 1
A short, intense burst of artillery fire from a number of weapons fired with the intention of overwhelming resistance or routing an attacking force.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How do you pronounce rafale?
Rafale has 2 syllables (counted from its American pronunciation in the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary).
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
Forms of rafale
- rafales plural
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).
How common is rafale?
Rafale appears about once in every 4 million words in written English, the 57,423rd most frequent word form in the list.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Where does rafale come from?
Borrowed from French rafale. In the military context the term may well be obsolete in English; it had been introduced into French military usage by General Hippolyte Langlois in the late nineteenth century, and adopted into English and American usage not long after, but the usage seems to have petered out in English by the end of World War I.
Source: English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0), through kaikki.org (Wiktextract).