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To strafe is to attack from a plane by flying low and fast over people or a road or a ship and guns at them all the way along. The picture in the word is the low pass and the long line of bullets — not a bomb dropped from high up. It is a war word, used in news and history writing: 'the column of refugees was strafed twice that morning'. It works as a noun too, though less often — a strafing run. Outside war it turns up in video games, where players talk about strafing in a quite different sense: moving sideways while still facing the enemy. That gamer meaning is now very common among young people and has almost nothing to do with the original. If you meet the word online, that is probably the one you are seeing. The history is the strange part. In the First World War, Germans used the slogan Gott strafe England — 'may God punish England'. British soldiers saw it everywhere, took the odd-looking word home as a joke, and it stuck. So an English word for shooting from a plane is really a German word for punish, kept alive by soldiers laughing at an enemy poster.
（飛機低空）掃射。台灣軍事報導多半寫「低空掃射」或「機槍掃射」。電玩裡的 strafe 是另一回事，指「橫向平移」，玩家直接講原文或說「側移」。
組成Borrowed whole from German strafen, 'to punish' — strafe is a form of that verb. It came from the wartime slogan Gott strafe England, which British troops saw on German posters and stamps in the First World War.
原始詞典資料7 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，原文照列，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
strafeverb/ˈstɹeɪ̯f/
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aeronauticsaerospaceaviationTo attack (ground targets) with automatic gunfire from a low-flying aircraft.
- These should be especially useful against low-flying planes that "strafe" infantry and transport columns with machine-gun fire and light bombs.
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governmentmilitarypoliticsTo rake (a target) with rapid or automatic gunfire.
- Laffey, fresh off from strafing Hiei, ran straight into a quarter of the Japanese navy's remaining destroyers, and, along with Kirishima, between gunfire and another successful Type 93 torpedo strike that tore off the ship's stern, the hapless destroyer was left drifting, ablaze, and would eventually sink.
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governmentmilitarypoliticsTo reprimand severely.
- You will get an officer sometimes fu'l of shout and swank, an' 'e 'll put 'em through it, an' strafe 'em, an' walk off parade feelin' that 'e 'as put the fear o' God into 'em.
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video-gamesTo sidestep; to move sideways without turning (a core mechanic of most first-person shooters).
- Strafe — Press the Alt key and the left or right Arrow key to slide side to side instead of turning left or right.
- If the NPC is close to the player, he may also try using the tried-and-true Quake circle-strafing technique.
strafenoun/ˈstɹeɪ̯f/
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A heavy artillery bombardment.
- They were unfortunate, for a well-aimed shell during a German evening strafe demolished the apple tree and the nest.
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An attack of machine-gun or cannon fire from a low-flying aircraft.
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video-gamesA sideways movement without turning.
- We also have added a new game control called the "defensive strafe," in which the user can press a button and stay facing forward.
資料來源：英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary（CC BY-SA 4.0）。 原文照列，未經改寫。