Weapon Type
Daggers & Knives
Short bladed weapons for close combat.
Daggers & Knives
Edged Weapons — Subcategory
Overview
The knife — a short single or double-edged cutting and thrusting blade — is the oldest and most universal of human tools and weapons. From the first knapped flint blade of the Stone Age to the combat knife carried by every modern soldier, knives and daggers have been universal constant across all cultures, all eras, and all social classes. Where swords were expensive prestige items, knives were carried by peasant and king alike.
The distinction between a knife (utility; one cutting edge; 7–30 cm) and a dagger (weapon; often double-edged; designed for thrusting; 15–50 cm) is cultural and contextual — many blades served both functions.
Major Historical Types
Stone Age Blades
- Knapped flint/obsidian blades — The first cutting tools; edges sharper than surgical steel; brittle; universal in the Paleolithic and Neolithic
- Clovis points — Fluted projectile points also used as knives
Bronze and Iron Age Daggers
- Copper dagger — Ötzi the Iceman (c. 3300 BCE) carried a flint-bladed knife with an ash handle; copper daggers were early prestige weapons
- Bronze dirk — Double-edged thrusting dagger; precursor to the sword
- Greek xiphos — Sometimes classified as a short sword; also functioned as a dagger
- Akinakes — Persian/Scythian short sword-dagger; 35–45 cm; worn at the hip
Medieval Daggers
- Rondel dagger — Stiff, narrow blade designed to penetrate gaps in plate armor; disc guards at pommel and cross-guard
- Misericorde ("mercy dagger") — Very thin, stiff blade; pushed through visor or armor joints to finish a downed knight
- Ballock dagger — Two rounded protrusions at the guard base; characteristic 14th–16th century form; civilians and soldiers alike
- Quillon dagger — Cross-hilted dagger matching the main gauche (left-hand parrying dagger)
- Main gauche — Left-hand parrying dagger; used with rapier in Renaissance sword-fighting; wide guard deflected opponent's blade
Renaissance and Early Modern
- Stiletto — Very thin, stiff blade; no cutting edge; purely thrusting; penetrated mail and gaps in plate; used as an assassin's weapon
- Dirk — Scottish Highland dagger; large single-edged blade; associated with Highland dress
- Cinquedea — Italian "five-finger" dagger; very wide, tapering blade; Renaissance Italy
Military Knives (Modern)
- Bowie knife — Large American fighting and utility knife; 9–15 inch clip-point blade; iconic frontier weapon
- Trench knife — WWI close-quarters weapons; knuckle-duster grip; double-edged blade (M1917, M1918); designed for silent trench raids
- Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife — Slender double-edged dagger; designed for WWII special forces; the defining WWII fighting knife
- Ka-Bar — US Marine Corps utility/fighting knife; 7-inch clip-point; carried from WWII through the present KA-BAR Knife
- Gerber Mark II — Vietnam-era double-edged fighting knife; serrated spine; widely carried by US special forces
This article is a stub. Contributions covering specific daggers, knives, and their cultural contexts are welcome.
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Bolo Knife
The bolo is the broad-bladed working knife of the Philippines — wider toward the tip, weighted for the chop, the universal tool of field and jungle — and a weapon with a genuine military career: the blade of the Philippine Revolution and the guerrilla resistance of World War II, and, in an unusual compliment, an official issue pattern of the United States Army, whose M1904 and M1917 bolos equipped engineers, medics, and machine-gun crews through two wars.
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Bowie Knife
The Bowie knife is the great American fighting blade of the nineteenth century: a heavy sheath knife, typically with a clipped point and a blade of eight inches or more, named for James Bowie and made famous by the 1827 Sandbar Fight, where a wounded Bowie killed his attacker with his big butcher-style knife. Within a decade Sheffield's cutlers were shipping Bowies to America by the crate, and the knife had become sidearm, tool, and legend across the frontier.
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Ek Commando Knife
The Ek Commando knife is the private-purchase fighting knife of World War II America: hand-ground daggers and fighters from John Ek's Connecticut shop, sold only to service members and shipped with a certificate carrying each knife's serial number. Paratroopers and raiders bought them by the thousand, presidents and generals owned presentation pieces, and the distinctive cast-lead X-head rivets in the wooden grip made the Ek one of the most recognizable American blades of the war.
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KA-BAR Knife
USMC utility knife
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Karambit
The karambit is the claw-shaped knife of the Malay world: a small, sharply curved blade from Sumatra and the surrounding archipelago, held reversed with a finger through the ring at its pommel so it cannot be dropped or easily taken. By tradition an ambush and last-resort weapon patterned on the tiger's claw, it spread through the region's silat fighting arts and, centuries later, into the global tactical-knife market, where its silhouette is now one of the most recognized in the industry.
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Kukri
The kukri is the forward-curved knife of Nepal: a broad, downward-angled blade that concentrates a blow like a hatchet while handling like a knife, equally at home splitting kindling and splitting helmets. It is the national blade of the Nepalese hill peoples, the universal tool of the Himalayan farmstead, and — as the issue sidearm of the Gurkha regiments for two centuries — one of the most famous and most instantly recognized fighting knives anywhere on earth.
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Marine Raider Stiletto
The Marine Raider stiletto is the U.S. Marine Corps' copy of the British Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knife: a slim double-edged dagger designed purely for silent killing, issued in 1942 to the new Raider battalions and paramarines. About 14,370 were made by Camillus, carried at Makin, Guadalcanal, and Bougainville, and its silhouette — with the Raider patch it appears on — became one of the Corps' most storied emblems, though as a working knife the delicate blade lost the argument to the KA-BAR within a year.
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Mark I Trench Knife
The Mark I trench knife of 1918 is the most recognizable close-combat weapon of the Great War: a double-edged dagger blade beneath a cast bronze knuckle-duster grip, its pommel ending in a skull-crusher spike. Designed for the raid — the silent, clawing fights in enemy trenches where rifles were useless — it reached the AEF late, served again in the Second World War with paratroops and rangers, and remains the collector's archetype of trench warfare.
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Tanto
The tanto is the dagger of the samurai: a single- or double-edged Japanese blade under thirty centimeters, forged, hardened, and polished by exactly the methods of the great swords and worn as their constant companion. It was armor's answer at grappling distance, the blade of the warrior household, and the canvas for some of the finest work Japanese smiths ever produced — and its name now also describes the chisel-pointed blade style modern makers borrowed from it.