.375 Winchester

The .375 Winchester was introduced in 1978 as a lever-action chambering built to give the .38-55 Winchester a stronger case and higher operating pressure while keeping a rimmed, straight-walled shape that would still cycle through a tubular-magazine lever gun. Winchester built it around its own Model 94 Big Bore rifle, and Marlin later chambered the Model 336 for it as well, giving hunters a cartridge that closed some of the gap between the .30-30 class of rounds and larger-bore lever-action chamberings without changing the basic lever-action receiver.

Its rimmed, straight case and modest overall length are typical of the tubular-magazine lever-action rifles it was designed for: bullets are loaded flat- or round-nosed so that recoil cannot drive one cartridge’s tip into the primer of the round ahead of it in the magazine tube, the same constraint that shapes every cartridge built for that kind of rifle. Factory loadings have historically centred on 200- and 220-grain bullets, aimed at short- to medium-range use on deer-sized game rather than long-range shooting.

This entry’s dimensions and pressure figure are taken from Wikipedia’s infobox, converted from the inch and psi figures it publishes; none of them carry an inline citation on Wikipedia itself, and no free C.I.P. or SAAMI datasheet was found for this cartridge, so every figure here is recorded as estimated rather than verified. The two bullet weights listed come from Hodgdon’s handloading data, which is the only ballistics source Wikipedia cites for this cartridge; because that page states no test-barrel length and its listed velocities are handloading results rather than factory-ammunition figures, no velocity point is recorded for either weight.