avalanche
Part of speech: noun
verb
Morphological type: simple
Etymology: From French avalanche, from Franco-Provençal (Savoy) avalançhe, blend of aval (“downhill”) and standard lavençhe, from Vulgar Latin *labanka (compare Occitan lavanca, Italian valanga), of uncertain origin, perhaps an alteration of Late Latin lābīna (“landslide”) (compare Franco-Provençal (Dauphiné) lavino, Romansh lavina), from Latin lābēs, from lābor (“to slip, slide”).
Inflected forms:
form: avalanches
pos: noun
tags: plural
form: avalanches
pos: verb
tags: present
singular
third-person
form: avalanching
pos: verb
tags: participle
present
form: avalanched
pos: verb
tags: participle
past
form: avalanched
pos: verb
tags: past
Senses:
gloss: A large mass or body of snow and ice sliding swiftly down a mountain side, or falling down a precipice.
pos: noun
examples: They were drinking from a fountain / That was pouring like an avalanche / Coming down the mountain
gloss: A fall of earth, rocks, etc., similar to that of an avalanche of snow or ice.
pos: noun
gloss: A sudden, great, or irresistible descent or influx; anything like an avalanche in suddenness and overwhelming quantity.
pos: noun
tags: broadly
examples: Yes, but she talked it away. She uses a whole language to herself. Her discourse is an avalanche of words, beneath which the hearers are overwhelmed.
I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul
The apparent success of the City and South London triggered an avalanche of bills for Tube railways, and in 1892 a Joint Select Committee of Parliament set out some ground rules.
gloss: To descend like an avalanche.
pos: verb
tags: intransitive
examples: Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to recollect where we were—[…] We began to get into country, now, threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads. […] ¶ Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody.
Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—
As it happened, I had progressed only some few feet out onto the snow when a clean-cut section stripped off the surface and avalanched.
gloss: To come down upon; to overwhelm.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: The shelf broke and the boxes avalanched the workers.
The applications were doubtless snowed under in the maze of official correspondence which avalanched the new government.
gloss: To propel downward like an avalanche.
pos: verb
tags: transitive
examples: When our artist and I were dropped down our first coal-mine, we felt a leetle bit anxious. It was something new. But we have been avalanched down the incline from Peak Forest, and boomeranged round the sudden curve at Rowsley, and have run the gauntlet at Penistone and King’s Cross without ever taking the precaution to say “God help us.”
The scuppers could not carry off the burden of water on the schooner’s deck. She rolled it out and took it in over one rail and the other; and at times, nose thrown skyward, sitting down on her heel, she avalanched it aft.
Then another misfortune avalanched itself upon me, before even I had fully taken in the extent of the first.
Swelter, following at high speed, had caught his toe at the raised lip of the opening, and unable to check his momentum, had avalanched himself into warm water.
Derived words: applanche
avalanche effect
avalancheless
avalanchelike
avalanche lily
electron avalanche
interavalanche
slab avalanche
Townsend avalanche
Translations: