shoot one's bolt
"shoot-one-s-bolt" is a 13-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“shoot one's bolt” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 16
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To use up one's resources, especially a singular one or one not readily restored.
Corpus desk
Index EN-shoot-one-s-bolt · shoot one's bolt · English
shoot one's bolt · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-MEGA 16 letters
- VOW-5 5 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "S" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | shoot one's bolt |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 16 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “shoot one's bolt” in English
Rare enough to double-check
shoot one's bolt is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 2 senses are on record.
shoot one's bolt doesn't appear in our generated misspelling index, and the word's spelling is regular enough that our generator found nothing worth flagging. No close-neighbour confusable shows up for this headword in our dataset, since no other headword is close enough in sound or shape to pair with it.
No explicit etymology string is stored for this entry, so its spelling is best read as a straightforward mapping from sound to letter. The correct English form is shoot one's bolt, spelled S-H-O-O-T- -O-N-E-'-S- -B-O-L-T.
Definition
- 1To use up one's resources, especially a singular one or one not readily restored.
- 2Of a male, to ejaculate.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how shoot one's bolt appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
We were playing checkers and, although I'd started off well, I seemed to have shot my bolt too soon.
The war situation was going from bad to worse. The Greek army, facing the Italians in Albania, had shot its bolt by spring. The Yugoslav revolution of April, for which SOE claimed some credit (our people had been there and post hoc, propter hoc), was followed by the prompt invasion of Yugoslavia and occupation of Greece.
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.