Scimitar is a type of sword, normally with a deeply curved blade with a single cutting edge, though some are known to exist with a blade very shallowly curved.
They can be found in one or two handed variants, with blades ranging in length from around 30" to 36", and the blades, while commonly depicted as being very wide (from cutting edge to the rear of the blade), seem most often have been very thin, very much like the shamshir[?] or talwar[?] swords.
It seems likely that scimitar-type weapons were developed from examples of swords brought by the conquering Macedonians under Alexander the Great, such as the kopis[?] sword, itself derived from the Egyptian khopesh[?] sword. Further, it's possible that the Falchion swords employed in the Middle Ages by Europeans were inspired by the scimitars of the Turks. Modern examples of similar blades are cavalry sabers and cutlasses of pirate fame.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump