CATASTROPHE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Catastrophe

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/kətˈæstrəfi/ Listen

noun

Catastrophe n.

An event producing a subversion of the order or system of things; a final event, usually of a calamitous or disastrous nature; hence, sudden calamity; great misfortune. "The strange catastrophe of affairs now at London." "The most horrible and portentous catastrophe that nature ever yet saw."

The final event in a romance or a dramatic piece; a denouement, as a death in a tragedy, or a marriage in a comedy.

(Geol.) A violent and widely extended change in the surface of the earth, as, an elevation or subsidence of some part of it, effected by internal causes.

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Etymology of 'Catastrophe'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Catastrophe" Quotes from Famous Books

... as an orphan, he had set foot in Tijuco. There his zeal had raised him high in the offices of the governor-general, into which he had been admitted when still very young. The future smiled on him; he would have filled some important position. Then this sudden catastrophe; the robbery of the diamond convoy, the massacre of the escort, the suspicion directed against him as the only official who could have divulged the secret of the expedition, his arrest, his appearance ...

— Eight Hundred Leagues on the Amazon • Jules Verne

... stared at one another in consternation. Here was a catastrophe to happen just at the last moment, when everyone was so happy and well satisfied! The dismay on the chubby face was so pitiful that neither of Mellicent's companions could find it in her heart to speak a word of reproof. They rather set ...

— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey

... alike its comfort, power, and speed. Before every engine, as it were, trots the ghost of a superseded horse, refuses most resolutely to trot faster than fifty miles an hour, and shies and threatens catastrophe at every point and curve. That fifty miles an hour, most authorities are agreed, is the limit of our speed for land travel, so far as existing conditions go.[5] Only a revolutionary reconstruction of the railways or the development of ...

— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... it will revive. It would not be the first time that such a result of a great catastrophe was found to be only temporary. I remember that Pepys records in his Diary that one result of the Great Plague was that the wig went out of fashion. People were afraid to wear wigs that might be made ...

— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... the horses, which showed an increasing uneasiness. Her own mare now shared the restlessness of the tall bay, and the two were footing it nervously here and there, tugging at the tethers, and tossing up their heads, with many a start, as if they feared and sought to flee from some approaching catastrophe—some vast and preternatural change—some forest fire which came galloping faster than even their fleet limbs could ...

— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick

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