The word sniper comes from hunting a small, jittery wading bird
British officers in 1770s India prized one game bird above others: the snipe, alert, well camouflaged and prone to zigzagging flight. Bagging one with a flintlock took stealth and patience, so a day's shooting became going sniping. Soldiers soon borrowed the joke for enemy marksmen, and by the First World War sniper was everyday language.
Letters home from India show snipe shooting shortening to sniping during the late eighteenth century, with the noun sniper appearing by the 1820s. A soldier's letter from 1772 already applies the idea to war: troops building gun batteries would hoist a hat with a cockade on a pole, watch the enemy pick it off with uncanny accuracy, and humorously call the game sniping while aiming back at the muzzle flash.
The older word sharpshooter has German roots. It translates Scharfschütze and appeared in British newspapers by 1801. It grew out of the marksmanship contests held across German states and Swiss cantons, where teams paraded flags showing a crossbow on one face and a target musket on the other. A shooting club in Lucerne holds a charter from 1466, the earliest known for firearms.
Accuracy depended on rifling, grooves inside the barrel that spin the bullet. It was invented in the late fifteenth century but for a long time appeared only in large cannons, while ordinary soldiers carried unreliable smoothbore muskets. In 1800 the British Army raised an Experimental Corps of Riflemen armed with the Baker rifle, far more precise though slower to load. In trials held in 1857, Sir Joseph Whitworth's muzzle-loader, with polygonal rifling that let the bullet travel without biting into grooves, beat the standard Enfield by about three to one and could reach targets at 2,000 yards against the Enfield's 1,400. Confederate marksmen in the American Civil War who used imported Whitworths became known as the Whitworth Sharpshooters.
Modern military snipers usually work in pairs, with a spotter who picks targets, reads wind from heat shimmer or an anemometer, and calculates range, angle and drift, sometimes on a tablet. Beyond shooting, their training covers stalking, camouflage, tracking and reconnaissance. The German emphasis on independent, concealed snipers, developed in the Second World War, still shapes Western doctrine.
Source: Sniper
