Arrow (pronounced ar-oh)
(1) A slender, straight and usually pointed missile or
weapon made to be shot from a bow and equipped with stabilizing fins
(historically feathers) at the end of the shaft near the nock.
(2) Anything resembling an arrow in form, function, or
character.
(3) A linear, wedge-shaped symbol used on maps, architectural
drawings, engineering blueprints or any document to indicate direction or
placement.
(4) In astronomy, the constellation Sagitta.
(5) In text handling and for other purposes, to indicate
the proper position of an insertion by means of an arrow-like symbol (often in
the form “to arrow in”).
(6) In graph theory, a directed edge (arc).
(7) In computing, the -> symbol, which has specific
meanings in a number of programming languages (in Unicode, the hexadecimal
range for the 112 supported arrows is 0x2190–0x21ff).
(8) In botany, the inflorescence or tassel of a mature
sugar cane plant.
Pre 900: From the Middle English arewe & arwe, from
the Old English arwan, from the
earlier earh (oblique form ēarw-), from the Proto-Germanic arhwō, from the primitive Indo-European arku & hérkwo- (bow, arrow). It was cognate
with the Persian پيکان (paykan) (arrow), the Faroese ørv (arrow), the Old Norse & Icelandic ör (arrow) (plural örvar), the Gothic arhvazna
& arhwazna; the (unattested)
Germanic arhwō (feminine) and related
to the Latin arcus (genitive arcūs) (bow, arc), thus the unattested Latin arku- (bow; arch) and the unattested pre-Germanic arku-ā (belonging to the bow). The word was rare in the Old English. The more
common forms to describe an arrow were stræl
(which is cognate with the word still common in Slavic and once prevalent in
Germanic, related to words meaning "flash, streak") and fla & flan (the -n perhaps mistaken for a plural inflection), from the Old
Norse, a North Germanic word which may originally conveyed the sense of "splinter"
or “sharp pioint”. Stræl was extinct by circa 1200; fla became flo in early
Middle English and survived only in Scots dialects until the fourteenth
century. Arrow is a noun & verb,
arrowing is a verb and arrowed is a verb and adjective although arrowless and arrowlike
are the more common adjectival forms; the noun plural is arrows.
Lindsay Lohan in ugg boots with bow & arrow; photoshoot by Ellen Von Unwerth (b 1954) for GQ magazine's German edition, Malibu Beach, California, June 2010.
Convair B36 Peacemaker. An incident on Valentine's Day 1950 which involved a USAF SAC Convair B-36B (44-92075) was the first (retrospectively) to be classified a "broken arrow".
The meaning in cartography and related fields (a mark
like an arrow) dates from 1834. The noun
arrow-head (also arrowhead) is from the late fifteenth century but the ancient
ones found buried in the soil were in the seventeenth century called elf-arrows. The noun arrow-root (also arrowroot) dates
from the 1690s, and was so named because the plant's fresh roots or tubers were
used to absorb toxins from the wounds caused by poison-darts. In US military terminology (command and control;
nuclear weapons safeguards), broken arrow refers to an accidental event involving
nuclear weapons, warheads or components not thought to create a risk of nuclear
war. The term had been used by the
military to mean other things, some localized to specific combat theatres, but
to avoid any confusion, the Pentagon in the mid-1960s standardized the nomenclature
for reporting incidents involving nuclear weapons or related components. At the time, many of the codes were based on Native
American-themed phrases (Broken Arrow, Empty Quiver, Bent Spear etc), something
which would not now be done.
Railton Mobil Special, powered by a pair of supercharged Napier Lion VIID (WD) broad arrow (W-12) aero-engines. On 16 September 1947 it set the world Land Speed Record (LSR) on the Bonneville Salt Flats at 394.2 mph (634.4 km/h) in a two-way run over the measured mile (385.6 & 403.1 mph (620.6 & 648.7 km/h)).
Broad arrow internal combustion engines (ICE) are also referred to as “W engines” and have three groups of cylinders, one vertical and the two others symmetrically angled at less than 90° on either side. The configuration has always been rare but is not new, the English Napier company building a W12 aero-engine between 1917-1935 which was such a sound design that development allowed it to enjoy an unusually long life as the most powerful engine of its era. As well as aircraft, it was used in boats and racing cars, a pair of W12s powering the car which in 1947 set the world land speed record (LSR), a mark which stood until 1964.
1992 Mercedes-Benz 600 SEL (W140) and the conceptual sketch for the proposed broad arrow W18 intended for the hypothetical 800SEL.
In the late 1980s, Mercedes-Benz, already concerned that
Jaguar & BMW had made the V12 seem a bit common, became alarmed when
learning a prototype BMW V16 (code name Goldfisch)
had been installed in a 7 series (E32) and was being tested. The Mercedes engineers didn’t need a tape
measure to know a V16 would be too long to fit under the hood (bonnet) of their
upcoming W140 and weren’t at all attracted to the idea of lengthening the nose,
knowing such a change would (1) further delay a programme already behind
schedule, (2) cost a lot of money in a project already over-budget and (3) make
no economic sense given the V16 would be a low-volume model. If a V16 was too long and an H16 too complex
and hard to package, the obvious solution was a broad-arrow engine which can be
thought of as a flattened V12 with an additional bank of cylinders in the
centre and thus a W18. Although wider
than a V12 and even a V8, the W140’s engine bay was wide and, being barely longer
than a straight-6, the idea seemed compelling.
BMW 750iL (E32) fitted with prototype 6.7 litre (406 cubic inch) V16 (codename Goldfisch). Such was the length of the V16 that the front-mounted radiator was deleted and replaced by twin units in the rear, large scoops installed above the rear wheels to direct airflow; a rear grill was fabricated for heat extraction.
It was a time of excess and the buoyant economies on both
sides of the Atlantic (and notably also in Japan) gave little hint of the
troubles to follow. The engineers decided
their flagship of the 1990s would be an 800 SEL, the only discussion note being
whether the internal components would be taken from the 2.6 litre (159 cubic
inch) six or the 2.8 litre (171 cubic inch) unit and thus create either a 7.8
litre (476 cubic inch) W18 or one of 8.4 litres (513 cubic inch). In a rare example of restraint, they settled for
the smaller one. There have been
suggestions the engineers thought BMW would never proceed with a V16 because of
the problems in packaging and doubted their own multi-bank proposal would ever
see the light of day but as a design it was hard for an engineer to resist so dutifully (and
one suspects lovingly) they drew the blueprints to be presented to the board
for approval.
Auto Motor magazine's sketch (2000) of a somewhat unfortunately proportioned V24 Maybach coupé (left); the circulated image of a Mercedes-Benz V24 (2 x M120 V12s) which probably always was fake news (centre) and the Maybach Exelero test-bed (2005) which made do with a V12 and followed Auto Motor's lead though with a finer sense of scale.
By the time the blueprints landed on the boardroom table it had become clear that things were changing and perhaps the 1990s might be a bit different to what had been envisaged in early 1987 when the parameters for the big W140 were laid down. As well as the disturbing indications that the US Federal Reserve was prepared to raise interest rates to the point where the economy would go into recession in a bid finally to tame the inflation which had been building since the late 1960s, also looming were ever-stricter emission regulations. Accordingly, the board vetoed the 800 SEL project and expressed themselves content the 6.0 litre (366 cubic inch) V12 (M120) already in development would be more than adequate for all purposes. The board’s decision turned out to be prescient, the M120 one of the company’s best power-plants and one which was enlarged several times for specialist applications, the largest displacing 7.3 litres (445 cubic inch).
Mercedes-Benz Vision Maybach 6 Cabriolet (2017).
Since then, the trend has been towards smaller capacity engines and, as the ICE approaches, if not extinction then certainly a diminished role in land transport, there’s no longer much talk of W18s or V16s (although Bugatti in June 2024 released one while they still could). However, in the late 1990s, the Mercedes-Benz engineers did have one final fling at multi-cylinder glory, filing conceptual drawings of a V24 (2 x M120s) which could be used under the (very long) hood of an imagined Maybach coupé. This one circulated but they appear never to have troubled the board by seeking approval to build even a prototype although, had the circumstances been different, it might have been a nice fit for either the one-off Maybach Exelero test-bed (2005) or the Vision Maybach 6 Cabriolet (2017) which nicely captured the spirit of the pre-war 500K & 540K special roadsters.
1932 Bucciali TAV 8-32 Saoutchik Fleche d’Or (Golden Arrow).
About as incongruous in the early 1930s as the 800 SEL
would have been sixty years later was the Bucciali TAV8-32. Produced by a French concern with a history
in military aviation, Bucciali manufactured automobiles between 1922-1932 and was
a noted pioneer in the (still uncommon though by then not ground-breaking) concept of front-wheel drive, then known
as Traction Avant (TAV), a phrase Citroën
would later make famous. Their machinery
was intriguing but the crowning achievement was the eighth iteration, the TAV
8-32 and Bucciali enjoyed a successful run in 1930, France for various reasons
not then greatly suffering from the depression which had already affected many
countries. The next year however the
economy went rapidly into decline and like many manufacturers, Bucciali’s
business became first marginal and bankruptcy soon beckoned, the company doing
well to limp to an inevitable demise in 1932.
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