A wooden block or log used as a chopping block or anvil; a historical military siege engine component.
From Old French 'billot' (block of wood), possibly related to 'bille' (ingot or log). The term appears in medieval military and domestic contexts with consistent meaning across Romance languages.
Medieval siege engineers called their wooden beam components 'billots'—a technical term that shows how even ancient warfare had specialized vocabularies that mostly died when those techniques became obsolete.
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