23 June 2025
We all know fireworks as a pyrotechnic display, shown as part of a celebration or special event. But the term has its origin in military use of combustibles and explosives during the Tudor period.
The earliest use of the term that I’m aware of is from a 1528 document, A Booke of Dyverse Necessaries to be Providede for the Towne of Calise, contained in the papers of the court of Henry VIII. The document is an inventory of military stores for the defense of Calais:
For defence of assault, if need should be. 1. First, in rosin for fire work, and other things. […] 6. To have packe threde. 7. In peter oile and lyne oile for fyre worke. 7. [sic] In sermeniake and camfere for fire worke. […] 24. Small thorne faggote for firework for to defend the assault.
(Note: the source text has partially modernized spelling; peter oile = petroleum (“rock oil”); lyne oile = linseed oil; sermeniake = ???; camfere = camphor)
The sense of a pyrotechnic display comes a few decades later. From the c. 1565 play The Bugbears:
O how horrible thie are clad with visards like develes, what a sort of lightes they had what store of squibbes & firworkes, and of rosen punned fine, who are those disguised.
And there is this description, written sometime before 1577, of a fireworks display at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, England:
On the next day (being Sunday,) there was nothing done vntil the euening, at which time there were fireworks shewed vpon the water, the which were both strange and wel executed: as sometimes passing vnder the water a long space, when all men had thought they had bene quenched, they would rise and mount out of the water againe, and burne very furiously vntill they were vtterlie consumed.
(Note: “fire-works” is hyphenated in the source, but this is at a line break.)
Fireworks can also be used metaphorically to refer to outbursts of emotion, especially anger and sexual attraction. Playwright Ben Jonson used it this way in his 1601 Fountaine of Selfe-Loue:
Anai[des]. Sir, I will garter my hose with your guttes; and that shall be all. Exit.
Mercur[y]. ’Slid what rare fire workes bee heere? flash, flash.
But in the twentieth century, the senses of the word came full circle, and fireworks also came to be used to refer to artillery or anti-aircraft fire, particularly at night. The London Times of 3 July 1916 had this description of the artillery barrages at the Battle of the Somme:
Not only directly before us, but to the north and south as far as the eye could see it was one display of fireworks. It was more constant than the flickering of summer lightning, resembling rather the fixed but quivering glow of the Aurora Borealis. One could distinguish the bursts of the great shells from the rhythmical pounding of trench mortars—terrible weapons in themselves—and the quick, ruddier flashing of shrapnel bursting in the smoke bank which hung overhead. Punctuating all, intensely white against the other flames, rose almost like a continuous fountain the star shells and red flares, like the balls of huge Roman candles, which soared and hung awhile and slowly sank and died away.
Sources:
Brewer, J. S., ed. Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, vol. 4, part 2. London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1872, 2227. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
The Bugbears (c. 1565). In Archive für das Studium der Neuern Sprachen und Litteraturen, 99. Braunschweig: George Westermann, 1897, 4.1a, 34. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Gascoigne, George. “A Brief Rehearsall, or Rather a True Copie of as Much as Was Presented Before Her Maiesties at Kenelworth” (before 1577). In The Whole Woorkes of George Gascoigne Esquyre. London: Abell Ieffes, 1587, sig. A3v–A4r. ProQuest Early English Books Online.
“The Great Battle.” Times (London), 3 July 1916, 9.5–6. Gale Primary Sources: Times Digital Archive.
Jonson, Ben. The Fountaine of Selfe-Loue. London: R. Read for Walter Burre, 1601, sig. H4v. ProQuest Early English Books Online.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. firework, n.
Photo credit: Jon Sullivan, 2002. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.