bullet: [16] Etymologically, a bullet is a ‘little ball’. It comes from French boulette, a diminutive form of boule ‘ball’, from which English also gets bowl, as in the game of bowls. It originally meant ‘cannon-ball’ as well as ‘rifle or pistol projectile’, but this sense had effectively died out by the mid-18th century. => bowl[bullet etymology, bullet origin, 英语词源]