boom
Language: English
Part of speech: verb
Pronunciation: enpr: bo͞om
ipa: /buːm/
other: /bʊm/
ipa: /bum/
rhymes: -uːm
Forms: form: booms
form: booming
form: boomed
form: boomed
Etymology: Onomatopoeic, perhaps borrowed; compare German bummen, Dutch bommen (“to hum, buzz”). The sense "a period of economic growth" is generally taken to derive from the sense "a rapid expansion", although other origins have also been suggested.
Senses: examples: text: Thunder boomed in the distance and lightning flashes lit up the horizon.
text: The cannon boomed, recoiled, and spewed a heavy smoke cloud.
text: Beneath the cliff, the sea was booming on the rocks.
text: I can hear the organ slowly booming from the chapel.
text: Did you ever hear a bittern booming?
ref: 1902, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles:
glosses: To make a loud, hollow, resonant sound.
examples: text: I was about to reach for the marmalade, when I heard the telephone tootling out in the hall and rose to attend to it. “Bertram Wooster's residence,” I said, having connected with the instrument. “Wooster in person at this end. Oh hullo,” I added, for the voice that boomed over the wire was that of Mrs Thomas Portarlington Travers of Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich – or, putting it another way, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia.
[...]
 “I'd give a tenner to have Aubrey Upjohn here at this moment.” “You can get him for nothing. He's in Uncle Tom's study.” Her face lit up. “He is?” [Aunt Dahlia] threw her head back and inflated the lungs. “UPJOHN!” she boomed, rather like someone calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee, and I issued a kindly word of warning. “Watch that blood pressure, old ancestor.”
ref: 1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, “I AND XVII”, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins, →OCLC:
glosses: To exclaim with force, to shout, to thunder.
raw_tags: of speech
examples: text: The population boomed in recent years.
text: Business was booming.
text: “If you look at South Florida right now, this place is booming,” Mr. DeSantis said recently. “Los Angeles isn’t booming. New York City isn’t booming.”
ref: 2021 March 22, Neil Vigdor, Michael Majchrowicz, Azi Paybarah, quoting Ron DeSantis, “Miami Beach, Overwhelmed by Spring Break, Extends Emergency Curfew”, in The New York Times, →ISSN:
text: Over this period, as plants boomed, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped by 90 per cent, triggering a period of global cooling.
ref: 2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 145:
synonyms: flourish
prosper
glosses: To flourish, grow, or progress.
examples: text: Men in grey robes slowly boom the drums of death.
glosses: To make (something) boom.
examples: text: Miles on miles of quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly[.]
ref: 1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887, →OCLC:
glosses: To make a deep, resonant, territorial vocalisation.
raw_tags: of a Eurasian bittern
topics: aeronautics
aerospace
aviation
business
engineering
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
glosses: To cause a sonic boom.
topics: aeronautics
aerospace
aviation
business
engineering
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
glosses: To subject (someone or something) to a sonic boom.
examples: text: If you pull this off every paper in England and America will be booming you.
ref: 1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Problem of Thor Bridge:
text: This unexpected stand on the budget met with some displeasure from his Democratic colleagues and the Administration , particularly in light of the fact that Truman had not forgotten that Douglas boomed Eisenhower as the Democrat nominee for President in 1948.
ref: 1964, Jerry Maynard Anderson, Paul H. Douglas: Insurgent Senate Spokesman for Humane Causes, 1949-1963:
text: Field's ostensible reason for going to Texas was to attend the second annual Texas Roundup in Austin. He boomed Roosevelt there. “Governor Roosevelt has all the strength possessed by Al Smith and none of Smith's weaknesses,” he told reporters.
ref: 2019 October 22, Norman D. Brown, Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929–1932, University of Texas Press, →ISBN:
glosses: To publicly praise, to rally behind.
examples: text: The train boomed through the station without stopping.
text: The ship was booming under the press of sail.
text: She comes booming down before it.
ref: 1841, Benjamin Totten, Naval Text-book and Dictionary […] :
glosses: To rush forwards with such violent intensity that it generates a sustained, overwhelming, roaring noise; especially from the perspective of a bystander who has been suddenly subjected to it.
raw_tags: of a vehicle
examples: text: It can get fast enough that it's hard to see what flashed on your screen though, so it would be nice if chess engines had a feature of persistently showing you what move they planned to play before they boomed, even if it took less than a second for them to figure it out.
ref: 2021 January 23, Bram Cohen, “You're doing computer chess game commentary wrong”, in Medium, archived from the original on 06 Dec 2022:
text: In its White game Stockfish had various moments of booming during these long thinks, but these long thinks always ended disappointingly in a slightly lower evaluation than it started with.
ref: 2022 April 22, Matthew Sadler, “TCEC Season 22 SuperFinal: Komodo Dragon vs Stockfish”, in TCEC, archived from the original on 13 Dec 2022:
topics: board-games
chess
computer
computing
engineering
games
mathematics
natural-sciences
physical-sciences
sciences
antonyms: moob
glosses: To rapidly adjust the evaluation of a position away from zero, indicating a likely win or loss.
examples: text: to boom railroad or mining shares
glosses: To cause to advance rapidly in price.
Derived terms: boom off
boom box
boom-boom
boomstick
boom town