1.
peashooter; pea gun (toy that shoots beans)
A simple toy gun, traditionally bamboo, that fires small beans or pellets. Mostly encountered today in the idiom 鳩が豆鉄砲を食ったよう.
豆鉄砲で遊んだ。
I played with a peashooter.
鳩が豆鉄砲を食ったような顔をした。
He looked like a pigeon hit by a peashooter — i.e., stunned and wide-eyed.
突然の知らせに、彼女は鳩が豆鉄砲を食ったような顔でこちらを見つめた。
At the sudden news, she stared at me with a stunned, wide-eyed look.
Compound of 豆 (bean) + 鉄砲 (gun), with rendaku turning てっぽう into でっぽう. The literal toy is rarely seen today; the word survives mainly in one famous idiom.
IDIOMATIC USAGE:
- 鳩が豆鉄砲を食ったよう: looking startled and dumbfounded, eyes wide open — the image is of a pigeon hit by a sudden tiny shot and frozen in surprise. This is far and away the most common way the word appears in modern Japanese.
SIMILAR WORDS:
- 水鉄砲: water gun — similar construction with a different ammo
- おもちゃの銃: toy gun — modern, generic equivalent