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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
cataclysm
noun
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Britain was totally unprepared for the cataclysm of the Franco-Prussian War late in 1870 and still less for its outcome.
▪ Do these eruptions act as a safety valve or will they lead to a cataclysm?
▪ Geophysicists have examined these continental scars to tell the story of cataclysms that struck the earth long ago.
▪ In short, there never was a series of divine cataclysms, and the existence of mankind on earth was relatively short.
▪ The continent approached the cataclysm of 1914 with a formal apparatus for the conduct of international relations which now seems strikingly small.
▪ The seventh seal triggers seven trumpets, which introduce various additional heavenly and earthly cataclysms.
▪ Time was no longer associated just with cataclysms and festivals but rather with everyday life.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Cataclysm

Cataclysm \Cat"a*clysm\, n. [L. cataclysmos, Gr. kataklysmo`s, from ? to dash over, inundate; kata` downward, against + ? to wash or dash over: cf. F. cataclysme.]

  1. An extensive overflow or sweeping flood of water; a deluge.

  2. (Geol.) Any violent catastrophe, involving sudden and extensive changes of the earth's surface.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
cataclysm

1630s, from French cataclysme (16c.), from Latin cataclysmos or directly from Greek kataklysmos "deluge, flood, inundation," from kataklyzein "to deluge," from kata "down" (see cata-) + klyzein "to wash," from PIE *kleue- "to wash, clean" (see cloaca).

Wiktionary
cataclysm

n. 1 A sudden, violent event. 2 (context geology English) A sudden and violent change in the earth's crust. 3 A great flood.

WordNet
cataclysm
  1. n. a sudden violent change in the earth's surface [syn: catastrophe]

  2. an event resulting in great loss and misfortune; "the whole city was affected by the irremediable calamity"; "the earthquake was a disaster" [syn: calamity, catastrophe, disaster, tragedy]

Wikipedia
Cataclysm

Cataclysm may refer to:

  • Deluge (mythology)
  • a hypothetical Doomsday event
  • any catastrophic geological phenomenon
  • more generally, any large-scale disaster
Cataclysm (Dragonlance)

In the Dragonlance books, the Cataclysm (Great Destruction) was a catastrophic event that occurred when the Kingpriest of Istar demanded to be given godlike powers in order to eliminate evil from the world.

Usage examples of "cataclysm".

Who understood everything which had happened to her and continued the fight with all the unyielding courage he loved and admired so much, refusing to surrender to the freak cataclysm which had exploded into her life.

On the religious front, Lyell took the common-sense view, arguing that it was unlikely God would keep interfering in the laws of nature, to provoke a series of major cataclysms.

Deluge holds so considerable a place in the legendary memories of all branches of the Aryan race, the monuments and original texts of Egypt, with their many cosmogonic speculations, have not afforded one, even distant, allusion to this cataclysm.

Later, after the Cataclysm and the fall of the Duarchy, the mines played out over the millennia, and Iron Stem withered from a small city into a small and struggling town.

As they watched, the Equinox raced away from the starship, rushing in a swept arc through the cloud of some past cataclysm.

He believed the deluge to have been universal, and he thought that, before that great cataclysm, men lived a thousand years and conversed with God, that Noah took one hundred years to build the ark, and that the earth, suspended in the air, is firmly held in the very centre of the universe which God had created from nothing.

As all the living forms of life are the lineal descendants of those which lived long before the Silurian epoch, we may feel certain that the ordinary succession by generation has never once been broken, and that no cataclysm has desolated the whole world.

Chapter Twenty-four, ancient Chinese traditions referring to a universal cataclysm were said to have been written down in a great text consisting of precisely 4320 volumes.

The cataclysm will happen again when that which was torn asunder returns to its original place.

There is an old sorcerer still alive there who lived in the days of the great cataclysm when his people and their land were torn from Earth.

Expelled from its own solar system by that cataclysm, it had wandered between the stars for a quarter of the life of the universe, uncaptured by any other gravity well but subtly affected by all it passed anywhere near.

I was snatched away from Yole during the cataclysm, so I have no personal knowledge of what else might have happened at the same time.

On the contrary, we have seen that many of the great myths of cataclysm seem to contain accurate eye-witness accounts of real conditions experienced by humanity during the last Ice Age.

I broke into her, and she whined and lay for a moment like a rabbit wounded in a trap under my convulsive thrusts no longer to be considered, but at the last moment she too thrust herself up against me, crucified, with a long silent scream, a whistling of outdrawn breath, and I felt the cataclysm shake her to pieces as I was dying on her breast.

He thought he saw between the overweaving greenery of the opposite far bank glints that might be windows of another City, the twin of this but ruined by some awful cataclysm that had crumbled and flooded it and made it the victim of the forest.