Saturday, April 6, 2013

Indian Word in English: Dum Dum

The dum-dum bullet is named after the village of Dum Dum near Calcutta in India. The Dum-Dum Arsenal was located in the village of Dum Dum and, in 1896, a captain in the British army, Neville Bertie-Clay, Superintendent of the Dum-Dum Arsenal, invented an expanding bullet which was nicknamed the "Dum-Dum bullet." You can read more about the Dum-Dum bullet at Wikipedia. In 1899, the Hague Convention prohibited the use of dum dum bullets and other types of expanding bullets in warfare.

While outlawed in warfare, dum dum bullets are sometimes used in hunting; the image below shows a dum dum bullet that was fired into an African buffalo: