Here in the U.S., a slingshot is a sort of children's weapon (not to be confused with the sling David slew Goliath with), made from a forked stick with elastic bands attached, and useful at most for putting out your neighbors' windows (or your playmates' eyes), while a catapult is always thought of here as a serious engine of war, the closest thing the Romans came to, maybe, to a weapon of mass destruction.

So here's my question: I've noticed that some British writers in the past used the word catapult to denote exactly what we Americans mean by slingshot. Robert Graves, for example, in Goodbye to all That and Dorothy Sayers in Murder Must Advertise, use the term in this sense.

Both of these books were written more than seventy years ago, though, so what I want to know is if this same sense for the word catapult is still current in British English.

I can't speak from experience or guarantee that these sources only deal with current useage, but you may be intersted in this page. It gives British English equivalents for American English words. It does give catapult as the British equivalent of the American slingshot. This is a similar site that agrees.

Yes, British children do break windows with catapults. 'Slingshot' is creeping in as a transatlantic import.

We also use 'catapult' for the Roman artillery piece.

Thanks, Methos and Ewood.

I don't know if either of you were active at the Jeeves Answerpoint site (if I'm allowed to mention that here), but if you were then you, too, may remember a post there, from someone in the U.K., which set me thinking on this subject in the first place. The questioner asked for directions for building a "catapult," for the purpose of being able to retaliate against his or her siblings. Several answers referring the questioner to webpages about the Roman artillary piece (as Ewood so appropriately calls it) were posted, but I was the only person, apparently, to whom it occurred that this questioner didn't have such a great degree of violence in mind (though considerable mischief).

By the time I had marshalled all I knew about making catapults (in the Roman sense) and slingshots (in the American sense), the Jeeves Answerpoint had gone belly up, so I never did get around to answering. But I still remember the question.

Click - creak - grind - whirr. That's the old memory creaking into action. Now you mention it, I do seem to have a vague memory of that question. Someone posted a link to a detailed website, I think, which answered much better than I could, so I didn't bother.

'Slingshot' is definitely in British English in the secondary meaning of 'a slingshot manoeuvre' (our spelling) such as overtaking another vehicle by coming fast out of a bend with a speed advantage already in place.

Educational, this forum isn't it ? I'd never realised until now that a slingshot was a catapult but had always assumed it was the same as sling , the weapon, 'shot' being added to distinguish it from a sling on a broken arm ,say, a loop ! The Oxford English Dictionary notes the word as of mid-C19 American origin. What added to my misunderstanding is the use of 'slingshot' to describe the acceleration of a space probe by the use of the gravitational pull of a planet. This pull causes the craft to move faster and faster while describing the path of a stone in a sling, hurling it.The American use seems to be a reference to the shape of the looped elastic, lying like the sling in the meaning of a looped rope or strap as means of supporting or carrying something, the stone doesn't it ? And I thought it was only with the use of high-tech weapons that we had difficulty in understanding one other !

As other Brits have suggested, I, too, can claim that I have never heard a British child describe the Y-shaped device as anything but a catapult. I do remember the AnswerPoint question, but have a notion that it asked for directions on how to build a trebuchet. That, of course, is much more of a catapultish WMD! Some British students are members of a dangerous sports club and one was recently killed after being hurled - unfortunately not into the catch-net - by such an engine.