COLLAPSE • FREE TRANSLATOR.ORG • Definition of Collapse

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/kəlˈæps/ Listen

noun

Collapse n.

A falling together suddenly, as of the sides of a hollow vessel.

A sudden and complete failure; an utter failure of any kind; a breakdown. (Colloq.)

(Med.) Extreme depression or sudden failing of all the vital powers, as the result of disease, injury, or nervous disturbance.

verb

Collapse v. i. (past & past part. collapsed; pres. part. collapsing)

To fall together suddenly, as the sides of a hollow vessel; to close by falling or shrinking together; to have the sides or parts of (a thing) fall in together, or be crushed in together; as, a flue in the boiler of a steam engine sometimes collapses. "A balloon collapses when the gas escapes from it."

To fail suddenly and completely, like something hollow when subject to too much pressure; to undergo a collapse; as, Maximilian's government collapsed soon after the French army left Mexico; many financial projects collapse after attaining some success and importance.

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Etymology of 'Collapse'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Collapse" Quotes from Famous Books

... He threatened me in all sorts of ways—said he would put me in prison and all that if I didn't help him. Oh, he's the worst man there ever was!" groaned the overwrought boy. And now the others could see that he was on the verge of collapse. ...

— The Rover Boys at Big Horn Ranch - The Cowboys' Double Round-Up • Edward Stratemeyer

... days he lived on a single Mole, unearthed quite by chance; then a Gopher, stalked from behind the big legs of Shag, saved him from utter collapse. Of a verity he was living from hand to mouth; such abject poverty he had never known, not even in the ...

— The Outcasts • W. A. Fraser

... its execution, or as uniformly sublime from first to last, excepting the Paradise Lost. In Milton only, first and last, is the power of the sublime revealed. In Milton only does this great agency blaze and glow as a furnace kept up to a white heat—without intermission and without collapse. ...

— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey

... rule by law. We should, again, have to watch perpetually over the mass of personal intrigue which is the 'curse of every despotic state.' We should require a large native army and live under a perpetual threat of mutiny. In fact, the mutiny of 1857 really represented the explosion and the collapse of this policy. Finally, we should have to choose between Mohammedans and Hindoos, and upon either alternative a ruler not himself belonging to the religion comes into inevitable conflict with their ...

— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen

... in the closing months of 1917. The Russian revolution had brought about the collapse of Russia as an enemy of Germany; and the Germans were enabled to transport most of their troops on the Russian frontier to the west and to the Italian frontier. Italy had lost half Venetia and enormous ...

— Mrs. Warren's Daughter - A Story of the Woman's Movement • Sir Harry Johnston

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