Bengal light

English

Alternative forms

• Bengola light

Noun

Bengal light (plural Bengal lights)

1. A bright blue flare prepared from nitre, sulphur, and the black sulphide of antimony; formerly used in signalling, but now chiefly as fireworks.
   • 1981, Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, trans. CK Scott Moncrieff & Terence Kilmartin, Folio Society 2005, p. 40:

     I saw no more of it than this sort of luminous panel, sharply defined against a vague and shadowy background, like the panels which the glow of a Bengal light or a searchlight beam will cut out and illuminate in a building the other parts of which remain plunged in darkness

   • 2006, Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day, Vintage, published 2007, page 161:

     at last, as if given up on our common sense, they took their leave with a salute of Bengal lights from which irony may not have been entirely absent.

   • "Details of a Sunset" , Vladimir Nabokov, collected stories Penguin p.90

     The last streetcar was disappearing in the mirrorlike murk of the street and , along the wire above it, a spark of Bengal light, crackling and quivering , sped into the distance like a blue star.

Synonyms

• blue light

Translations

bright blue flare

• Bengali: বাংলা বাতি (baṅla bati)
• Catalan: llum de bengala f
• Finnish: bengalin tuli, bengalintuli
• German: bengalisches Feuer n
• Romanian: foc bengal (ro) n
• Russian: бенга́льский ого́нь (ru) m (bengálʹskij ogónʹ)
• Ukrainian: бенга́льський вого́нь (uk) m (benhálʹsʹkyj vohónʹ)