Meaning
The first, forceful move in an attack, contest or argument: the initial volley of criticism, lawsuits, advertising or sporting pressure that opens hostilities. A figurative use of the military term for a simultaneous or concentrated discharge of guns, applied to any rivalry conducted with words instead of shells. Stronger and more martial than first step or opening move; it promises escalation, so it suits rivalries - campaigns, lawsuits, price wars, debates - better than neutral beginnings. The unrelated legal salvo, a saving clause, survives mainly in salvo clause. Regional use: General English; the word arrived via Italian or French military vocabulary.
Origin
Salvo is the OED's gunnery noun: earliest evidence 1591, in a text by William Garrard and Robert Hitchcock, borrowed from Italian salva, a salute or volley - verified directly. Etymonline adds that English salva of the 1590s meant a simultaneous discharge of guns intended as a salute, with the spelling salvo arising by 1719, from Latin salve, hail, the vocative of salvus, healthy - the notion being dignitaries greeted by gunfire aimed harmlessly into the air. Merriam-Webster dates the noun to 1591, derives Italian salva from French salve where Etymonline and the OED treat Italian salva as immediate, and defines the figurative sense as a spirited attack, illustrating it with the first salvo of a political campaign - the route disagreement reported. A homonym, the OED's legal salvo of 1642, means a reservation or saving clause. The collocation opening salvo appears only sporadically in nineteenth-century corpus data and is common from the 1960s; Wiktionary cites figurative uses from BBC Sport in 2011 and The Sunday Times in 2019.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- first salvo
- opening volley
Usage Examples
- The senator's op-ed was just the opening salvo in a long fight over the tax bill.
- The rival airline's fare cuts were the opening salvo of a summer price war.
- Her opening salvo in the debate, a blunt question about his record, put him on the back foot.