Ida (sword)

The Ida is a kind of sword used by the Yoruba people of West Africa. It is a long sword with a narrow to wide blade and sheathe. The sword is sharp, and cuts on contact but typically begins to dull if not sharpened regularly. It can be single-edged or double-edged. These blades are typically heavier by the tip of the blade.

During wars, pepper and poison are added to it to paralyze anyone who is cut by the sword. It can be wielded in any way (either one-handed or two-handed). The Yoruba people use this sword for hunting, war and other uses. The blade of the sword is in an elongated leaf-shaped form. It is designed for cutting and hacking.

Production

The Yoruba blacksmiths were among the most skilled in West Africa. They employed different techniques in the making of these Ida swords. They were involved in the mining and smelting of iron ore before 800 A.D. This style of sword was also sometimes used by other surrounding peoples such as the Bini and the Igbo.

Variations

There were many other variations of the Ida. The Yoruba also used many other bladed-weapons.

Ida (river)

The Ida is a 57km (35mi) long tributary of the river Bodva in eastern Slovakia.

Coordinates: 48°35′N 20°57′E / 48.583°N 20.950°E / 48.583; 20.950

Ida (given name)

Ida is a given name occurring independently in several cultures. In Germany, Ida is a female name derived from a Germanic word id, meaning "labor, work." Alternately, it may be related to the name of the Old Norse goddess Iðunn. Ida also occurs as an anglicisation of the Irish girl's given name Íde.

Ida is a currently popular name in Scandinavia and is among the top 10 names given to girls born in 2013 in Denmark. It was among the top 20 names for newborn girls in Norway in 2013 and among the top 50 names for newborn girls in Sweden in 2013. It was among the top 10 names for girls born to Swedish speaking families in Finland in 2013. Finnish variant Iida was among the top ten most popular names given to newborn girls in Finland in 2013. Ida was at its height of popularity in the United States in the 1880s, when it ranked among the top ten names for girls. It remained among the top 100 most popular names for girls there until 1930. It last ranked among the top 1,000 names for girls in the United States in 1986.

Ida (film)

Ida (pronounced [ˈida]) is a 2013 Polish drama film directed by Paweł Pawlikowski and written by Pawlikowski and Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Set in Poland in 1962, it is about a young woman on the verge of taking vows as a Catholic nun. Orphaned as an infant during the German occupation of World War II, she must now meet her aunt. The former Communist state prosecutor and only surviving relative tells her that her parents were Jewish. The two women embark on a road trip into the Polish countryside to learn the fate of their family. Called a "compact masterpiece" and an "eerily beautiful road movie", the film has also been said to "contain a cosmos of guilt, violence and pain", even if certain historical events (German occupation of Poland, the Holocaust and Stalinism) remain unsaid: "none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse".

Ida won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, becoming the first Polish film to do so. It had earlier been selected as Best Film of 2014 by the European Film Academy and as Best Film Not in the English Language of 2014 by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA).

Sword

A sword is a bladed weapon intended for both cutting and thrusting. The precise definition of the term varies with the historical epoch or the geographical region under consideration. A sword in the most narrow sense consists of a straight blade with two edges and a hilt, but depending on context, the term is also often used to refer to bladed weapons with a single edge (also referred to as a backsword).

Historically, the sword developed in the Bronze Age, evolving from the dagger; the earliest specimens date to ca. 1600 BC. The later Iron Age sword remained fairly short and without a crossguard. The spatha, as it developed in the Late Roman army, became the predecessor of the European sword of the Middle Ages, at first adopted as the Migration period sword, and only in the High Middle Ages, developed into the classical arming sword with crossguard. The word sword continues the Old English, sweord.

The use of a sword is known as swordsmanship or (in an early modern or modern context) as fencing. In the Early Modern period, western sword design diverged into roughly two forms, the thrusting swords and the sabers:

Sword (disambiguation)

A sword is a cutting and/or thrusting weapon.

Sword, Swords, or The Sword may also refer to:

People

Places

Business and technology

Books

Sword (comics)

Sword, in comics, may refer to:

See also