Artillery is a category of big military weapons constructed to fire munitions way past power and the scope of the small arms of infantry. Early artillery development led to hefty, pretty immobile siege engines, and centered on the capacity to breach fortifications. As technology improved, lighter, more mobile field artillery developed for battlefield use. This development continues now; modern self propelled artillery vehicles are highly mobile weapons of great versatility supplying the greatest share of the complete firepower of a military.
In its first sense, the term artillery referred to any group of soldiers mostly equipped with some type of armour or manufactured weapon. Since the addition of gunpowder and cannon, the word “artillery” has mostly meant cannon, and in modern use, it generally refers to shell-firing guns, howitzers, mortars, rockets and guided missiles.
In common language, the term artillery is usually used to refer to individual apparatus, together with their accessories and fittings, although these assemblages are more correctly called “equipments”. Nevertheless, there’s no generally accepted common term for a gun, howitzer, mortar, and so forth: the Usa uses “artillery piece”, but most English-speaking militaries use “firearm” and “mortar”. The projectiles fired are generally either “shot” (if solid) or “shell” (if not). “Shell” is a widely used common term for a projectile, which is a part of munitions.