enfilade

Definition

A line or straight passage, or the position of that which lies in a straight line.

Etymology

Borrowed from French enfilade.

Example Sentences

• "In his Booker Prize-winning novel The Line of Beauty, Alan Hollinghurst wrote about people who know their world history as being able to look back through the millennia as an enfilade of rooms: Greece yields to Rome; Rome to the Byzantine Empire ... the Renaissance ... the British Empire ... America ... China. The same goes for people who can recite their kings and queens. British history clicks into a long enfilade of discrete, identifiable periods."
• "Uncle Charles, a truly unparalleled slinger of shit, is laying down an enfilade of same, trying to mollify men who seem way more in need of a good brow-mopping than I."
• "In minutes they had gained the top, fell prone, and began to pour deadly repeater-fire into the enemy below while their compatriots raked the top of the coulee with an enfilade."