thumb|upright|Colichemarde smallsword with a silver guard, 18th century. The abrupt narrowing of the blade, the defining feature of the colichemarde, is visible. Vevey historical museum. Colichemarde is a type of small sword (often written "smallsword") blade that was popular from the late 17th to the mid-18th century.
thumb|upright|Colichemarde smallsword with a silver guard, 18th century. The abrupt narrowing of the blade, the defining feature of the colichemarde, is visible. Vevey historical museum. Colichemarde is a type of small sword (often written "smallsword") blade that was popular from the late 17th to the mid-18th century.
==Overview== The small sword is considered to be a descendant of the "transitional rapier", which itself evolved from the rapier due to the demand for a lighter sword, easier to wear. The shape of a colichemarde blade features a wide forte, which abruptly tapers to a much narrower form at a point varying between a fifth to a third of the blade length from the hilt. The blade cross section was most often triangular and hollow-ground. This configuration combines good parrying characteristics, due to the wide blade forte, with the good maneuverability and thrusting characteristics imparted by the narrow blade foible. Its lighter weight, shorter length and superior balance, compared to the rapier, allowed faster and more accurate movement of the blade. This enabled the fencer to achieve a more precisely targeted thrust on an adversary.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).