shrapnel [E19th] During the Peninsular War in Spain and Portugal (1808–14), General Henry Shrapnel invented a shell that contained bullets and a small bursting charge, which, when fired by the time fuse, burst the shell and scattered the bullets in a shower. Those firing the projectile gave it the name Shrapnel shell—the bullets were Shrapnel shot, or simply shrapnel. During the Second World War shrapnel acquired its modern sense, ‘fragments of a bomb, shell, or other object thrown out by an explosion’. The sense ‘coins, loose change’ started life as New Zealand military slang around the time of the First World War.