The peashooter (sometimes spelled pea-shooter or pea shooter) is a toy version of the blowgun or blowpipe. It is usually a tube that launches its projectiles via blowing. As the name suggests the normal ammunition is

pea The pea is most commonly the small spherical seed or the seed-pod of the flowering plant species ''Pisum sativum''. Each pod contains several peas, which can be green or yellow. Botanically, pea pods are fruit, since they contain seeds and d ...

s (usually dried), though other seeds, fruits, improvised darts, or wadded up paper can also be used. The P-26

fighter aircraft Fighter aircraft are fixed-wing military aircraft designed primarily for air-to-air combat. In military conflict, the role of fighter aircraft is to establish air superiority of the battlespace. Domination of the airspace above a battlefield ...

was nicknamed the shooter of peas because it has no visible armament (it had two machine guns on the floor of the cockpit shooting through the propeller). It did, however, have a long tube

gunsight A sight is an aiming device used to assist in visually aligning ranged weapons, surveying instruments or optical illumination equipments with the intended target. Sights can be a simple set or system of physical markers that have to be aligne ...

just forward of the

windscreen The windshield (North American English) or windscreen (Commonwealth English) of an aircraft, car, bus, motorbike, truck, train, boat or streetcar is the front window, which provides visibility while protecting occupants from the elements. Mo ...

that appeared to be its only armament.

Peashooting

Peashooting (sometimes spelled pea-shooting or pea shooting) is the act of shooting dried

s out of a tube, a peashooter, by blowing through it. A similar effect can be achieved by using small bits of

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distributed ...

instead of peas. A sport has developed around pea shooting, in which peas are shot into a target, similar to those used for

archery Archery is the sport, practice, or skill of using a bow to shoot arrows.Paterson ''Encyclopaedia of Archery'' p. 17 The word comes from the Latin ''arcus'', meaning bow. Historically, archery has been used for hunting and combat. In m ...

. The target may be made of a soft substance (putty) so that the peas will stick into it or at least make indentations that easily identify the location of the hit. The

World Pea Shooting Championships The World Pea Shooting Championships have been held annually since 1971 on the second Saturday in July, in the village of Witcham near Ely, Cambridgeshire, Ely in Cambridgeshire, England, and has attracted competitors from as far afield as the USA ...

are held annually in the village of

Witcham Witcham is a small village near Ely in Cambridgeshire, England. The village is surrounded by fenland farms and has a village hall and a 13th-century church dedicated to St Martin. It has a pub called the White Horse, which was the winner of t ...

, UK.World Pea Shooting Championships

References

External links

* Toy weapons Games and sports introduced in 1970 {{toy-stub