Cataclysm

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈkætəˌklɪzm̩/

Definitions

  1. A sudden and violent event causing great destruction or fundamental change
  2. A sudden and violent upheaval or disaster that causes widespread destruction and transforms existing conditions
  3. An abrupt catastrophic occurrence or calamity that devastates systems, landscapes, or societies through force or intensity

Etymology: For most of its history, it meant a flood or deluge, most famously Noah's Flood. When Jewish scholars in Alexandria translated the Hebrew Bible into Greek, probably in the third century BC, they needed a word for the waters of Genesis, and they chose "kataklysmos." The New Testament kept it: in the Gospel of Matthew, people go on eating and drinking until the day Noah enters the ark and "the cataclysm" sweeps them all away. The Greek word was an image before it was a disaster. "Kataklyzein" joined "kata," down, to "klyzein," to wash or dash over, so it described water crashing down and rinsing the land clean. Plato had already used it for flood in this full sense. In the "Timaeus," an Egyptian priest teases Solon that the Greeks remember only one deluge, when the world has been drowned many times. The same verb "klyzein" also gave the Greeks "klyster," a syringe for washing out the body, which is why English once called an enema a clyster. Latin borrowed the Greek as "cataclysmus," and French made it "cataclysme." English took it from French in the 1600s, still meaning a deluge, especially the Flood of Genesis. The water drained out of it during the nineteenth century. Geologists were arguing over whether the earth had been shaped by slow, steady forces or by sudden, violent upheavals, and floods were only one kind of upheaval in that argument. In the course of the century the word came to mean any sudden convulsion of nature, and soon wars and revolutions too. A word that had once meant a deluge, above all the Flood of Genesis, became the general name for any sudden catastrophe that sweeps away the world as it was.

Synonyms: disaster, catastrophe, upheaval, calamity, crisis

Antonyms: blessing, boon