A state of extreme (usually irremediable) ruin and misfortune

Usage examples of catastrophe.

While Makerakera the expert on aggression sweated frantically to weld together a scratch team of whoever could be spared to join him - Choong from Hong Kong, Jenny Fender from Indiana, Stanislaus Danquah from Accra, and some trainees - the little Greek Pericles Phranakis turned his back on the catastrophe and went away down a path of his own, to a land where success had crowned his efforts with a wreath of bay.

Determined to avoid war, Jefferson called for an embargo on all American shipping, which John Adams, like most New Englanders, saw as a catastrophe for New England, if not the nation.

And the stopover in Port Chuma, capital of Gondwanaland, former European colony of Bamba del Oro, and now sovereign nation on the brink of social and economic catastrophe, was interminable.

According to this portrayal, those were times of animality and barbaric, uncontrolled procreation, of catastrophe both economic and military, and the undeniable achievements of past civilization were presented as an expression of the strength and determination that permitted people to overcome the benightedness and the cruelty of the period: those achievements, then, came about as it were in spite of the prevailing tendency to live at the cost of others.

Its innocently white face, wreathed with snowy cirri and showing no trace of the ice ring or the catastrophe, gently swam through the void, pushing the blackness and the pale dust of the stars out of the frame of the screen.

Tied from his belt to the crossarm, it held him suspended fifty-seven feet above the ground, in a perfect position to watch his mission end in catastrophe.

As I advanced along the bank opposed to them, I was further amazed to hear them discoursing quite equably together, so that it was impossible to say on the face of it whether a catastrophe had occurred, or the great heat of a cloudless summer day had tempted an eccentric couple to seek for coolness in the directest fashion, without absolute disregard to propriety.

Less than two years after the Unzen catastrophe another group of volcano watchers, led by Stanley Williams of the University of Arizona, descended into the rim of an active volcano called Galeras in Colombia.

Stellar explosions are interesting and sites of great opportunity because they are the original source of all exotic minerals, but opening gates to their vicinity is hazardous because Ty believes the time-mobile races often precipitate such catastrophes for their own purposes.

But it might be argued that had more non-Nazi Germans read it before 1933 and had the foreign statesmen of the world perused it carefully while there still was time, both Germany and the world might have been saved from catastrophe.

The last shreds of the glamourie that Dame Alecto and the Dowager Duchess of Wessex had set upon her when they brought her to this alien England was lifted by catastrophe, and Sarah realized at last who she was.

He tried to create an ecological catastrophe by dumping Kuwaiti oil into the Persian Gulf.

The Quadi and the Marcomanni, who had taken the lead in the war, were the most severely punished in its catastrophe.

What happens if the metagalactic center is empty when the catastrophe arrives?

Tobacconist against which newsboards leaned and told of a dreadful catastrophe in New York.