A mishap caused by something suddenly falling down or caving in

Usage examples of collapse.

For nearly 600 years, between the collapse of the Abbasid Empire in the thirteenth century and the waning years of the Ottoman era in the late nineteenth century, government authority was tenuous and tribal Iraq was, in effect, autonomous.

With dreadful speed the fading Beam collapses, back, back alid down, losing all cohesion.

Again and again, they had to let themselves collapse back into an ameboid shape, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ, but each failure smoothed the road.

Lena held out her arms and Andi collapsed beside her, eyes closed, wishing she could cry.

Capets and the Plantagenets that agitated the whole period and culminated in the collapse of the Angevin empire.

Then the dewar would collapse instantly under the water pressure, causing all the remaining antihydrogen to be mixed with matter.

The Arteria Collapse had plunged Ulubis into solitude once again, along with ninety-five per cent of the connected galaxy.

A swathe of portal destruc- tion had swung across the million-star volume all around Leseum back in the time of the Arteria Collapse, leaving only the bunched Leseum systems themselves connected inside a vast volume of backwardness.

Any crude attempt at reprogramming would destroy him, collapsing not only his personality structure, but much of his autonymous control systems as well.

The axman choked and flung up his hands to scrabble at his throat, then collapsed.

Tiber rose just enough to ensure that some of the public latrines backfilled and floated excrement out of their doors, a vegetable shortage developed when the Campus Martius and the Campus Vaticanus were covered with a few inches of water, and shoddily built high-rise insulae began to crumble into total collapse or suddenly manifested huge cracks in walls and foundations.

To drive the convoy away as well, to leave the colonnade, go into the palace, order the room darkened, collapse on the bed, send for cold water, call in a plaintive voice for his dog Banga, and complain to him about the hemicrania.

Without the support of the King or the people, with American Marines and aircraft openly siding with the loyalists, with the Jefferson, her consorts, and her air wing on station between Bangkok and Sattahip, the rebellion had collapsed as quickly as it had begun.

Like a collapsing wall, a sheet of bees detached itself from the GM building and floated towards the gathering swarm, so large by now that it seemed to extend from one end of the park to the other.

On September 28, 2000, he set off the bloodiest upheaval between Israeli forces and Palestinians in a generation, which resulted in a collapse of the seven-year peace process.