To have tried one’s utmost; to have spent all of one’s resources. This term comes from medieval archery and was a well-known proverb by the early thirteenth century: “A fool’s bolt is soon shot.” The bolt was a short, heavy, blunt-headed arrow fired with a crossbow, and the archer who used up all his bolts at once, leaving him with none, was regarded as a fool. The modern (twentieth-century) counterpart is to shoot one’s wad. This term comes from gambling, the “wad” in question being a roll of bank notes, but it has likewise been extended to mean spending all of one’s resources. Bernard Malamud used the expression (Tenants, 1971): “I want to be thought of as a going concern, not a freak who had published a good first novel and shot his wad.”