Earth & SkyGreek → English
Cataclysm
/ˈkætəklɪzəm/noun
A violent upheaval that destroys the order of things.
The Greek roots
κατά
katá
down
κλύζειν
klýzein
to wash, dash over
Literally: “a washing down”
The story of the word
κατακλυσμός meant a deluge, and the Septuagint translators used it for Noah's flood, which fixed the word's scale for good. Seventeenth-century natural philosophers took it up for the sudden global floods they believed had shaped the earth's surface. When Cuvier's catastrophism lost the argument to gradual geology, cataclysm kept the violence and dropped the water, ending as a general word for disaster.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1630s
Same family
clystercatastrophecataract
In a sentence
The 1923 earthquake was a cataclysm Tokyo rebuilt itself around.