pepperbox

pepper +‎ box

pepperbox (plural pepperboxes)

1. A pepper shaker.
2. (firearms) A repeating firearm with three or more barrels grouped around a central axis.
   • 1984, William Gibson, Neuromancer (Sprawl; book 1), New York, N.Y.: Ace Books, →ISBN, page 21:

     She had her knees up, resting her wrists on them; the pepperbox muzzle of a flechette pistol emerged from her hands.

3. A buttress at one side of the court in the game of fives.
4. (architecture) A tower capped by a cupola, looking similar to a giant pepper shaker.
   • 1861, Elizabeth Gaskell, The Grey Woman:

     Large, stately, and dark was its [the château's] outline against the dusky night-sky; there were pepper-boxes and tourelles and what-not fantastically going up into the dim starlight.

5. (architecture, slang, chiefly in the plural) Any of the buildings of the Royal Academy and National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, London, having cupolas on the roof.
   • 1887, Charles Mackay, Through the Long Day: Or, Memorials of a Literary Life, page 113:

     I also remember the old Royal Mews that stood on the site of the present trumpery National Gallery, with its too suggestive pepper-boxes; […]

   • 2012, Edward Verrall Lucas, Highways and Byways in London:

     Its architect, Wilkins, had the misfortune to be chosen to erect our much-abused National Gallery building, with its condemned "pepper-boxes" of cupolas; […]

• (buildings in London): 1873, John Camden Hotten, The Slang Dictionary