Enfilade

By Deane Barker

This is a military term that means weapons can be fired down the longest axis of an enemy formation.

If you’re at the flank of a firing line, you can fire down the entire line. If you’re in a plane flying along the length of a trench, you can fire entire the trench, following its line.

Why I Looked It Up

In a book about World War 1, I found this:

During the attack they were caught in the enfilade fire of six German machine guns.

Postscript

Added on

I was watching a video on apartment styles in New York City, and the architect talked about the “enfilade” style of apartment, where one room led to another room.

From Apartment Therapy:

[…] features of grand historic houses is the enfilade, the way rooms were arranged in a row with doorways lined up so you could see from one end of the row to the other. A creation of the Baroque era, classic enfilades were actually related not just to aesthetics, but to a stately expression of hierarchies and honors.

From Wikipedia:

In architecture, an enfilade is a suite of rooms formally aligned with each other. This was a common feature in grand European architecture from the Baroque period onward, although there are earlier examples, such as the Vatican stanze. The doors entering each room are aligned with the doors of the connecting rooms along a single axis, providing a vista through the entire suite of rooms.