Definition of "pennon"
pennon
noun
plural pennons
A thin, often triangular flag or streamer, especially as hung from the end of a lance or spear.
Quotations
Her yellow lockes crisped, like golden wyre,About her shoulders weren loosely shed,And when the winde emongst them did inspyre,They waued like a penon wyde dispredAnd low behinde her backe were scattered:
1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book II, Canto III”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, page 227
Bar Harry England, that sweeps through our landWith pennons painted in the blood of Harfleur:
1599, William Shakespeare, “The Life of Henry the Fift”, in Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies […] (First Folio), London: […] Isaac Iaggard, and Ed[ward] Blount, published 1623, [Act III, scene v]
[…] in spite of a sort of screen intended to protect them from the wind, the flame of the torches streamed sideways into the air, like the unfurled pennon of a chieftain.
1820, Walter Scott, chapter VII, in Ivanhoe; a Romance. […], volumes (please specify |volume=I to III), Edinburgh: […] Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson, and Co. […], page 103
Precisely in the middle of the quadrangle were placed perpendicularly in the ground, a hundred or more slender, fresh-cut poles, stripped of their bark, and decorated at the end with a floating pennon of white tappa;
1846, Herman Melville, Typee, New York: Wiley and Putnam, Part 1, Chapter 23, p. 214
(literary, obsolete) A wing (appendage of an animal's body enabling it to fly); any of the outermost primary feathers on a wing.
Quotations
[…] sodainly there descended before him, as his face was bent towards the earth, an Angell, whose wings had glorious Pennons, and whose face glistered as the beames of the Sunne,
1630, Henry Lord, A Display of Two Forraigne Sects in the East Indies, London: Francis Constable, “The Religion of the Persees,” Chapter 4, p. 16