cataclysmic

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“
Discovering them as a young teen raised Catholic was cataclysmic, as listening to Bad Religion ushered in a period of newfound open-mindedness and angst.

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Definitions (2)

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  1. Pertaining to, of the nature of, or characterized by cataclysms. In the reign of his [Frederick's] grandnephew, whose evil lot fell on the cataclysmic times of Napoleon. Lowe, Bismarck, I. 43. There has always been in Geology a tendency to cataclysmic theories of causation; a proneness to attribute the grand changes experienced by the earth's crust to extraordinary causes. J. Croll, Climate and Cosmology, p. 11.

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Examples (50)

  • Once she was on all fours, she looked around to make sure the circle of stones wasn't falling, or closing in, or anything similarly cataclysmic, and then stood up to breathe the beautifully free, cold air Before she was done admiring the atmosphere, she had taken her bearings on a faint but unmistakable smell of pork and carrots. —  Magazine - Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine - 2007 - Issue 03 - March
  • Perhaps its original builders had rigged it as a cataclysmic trap of sorts, just as they had rigged strange traps elsewhere in the circular building But the roof had dropped. —  036 - Mystery Under the Sea
  • His nature is almost cataclysmic, and once filled with the fire of the Lord, he bursts forth among his fellow-men “with the right hand striking,” to use his own vivid metaphor, but before this evidence of power has come an agonising period of doubt. —  Mahomet
  • He aimed at the ledge and fired The results were cataclysmic, for the man had shot a rifle grenade. —  025 - Land of Always-Night
  • In the very next year after my near-cataclysmic debacle, I made more than $100 million. —  Original Signal - Transmitting Buzz
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Roget's II Roget's II: The New Thesaurus

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Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary. Copyright © 2003, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

Etymologies (1)

Toggle Century etymologies Century Dictionary (1)

  1. from cataclysm + -ic; = French cataclysmique.
 

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