COLLAPSE • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • 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

... foreign policy that would estrange the United States and perhaps even throw its support to Germany would not only lose the war to Great Britain, but it would be perhaps the blackest crime in history, for it would mean the collapse of that British-American cooeperation, and the destruction of those British-American ideals and institutions which are the greatest facts in the modern world. This conviction was the basis of Sir Edward's policy from the day that Great Britain ...

— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick

... appearances, when you've got nothing to do but sit and watch your immediate neighbour. But on that earlier occasion our army had been successful; it seemed that the war would soon find its conclusion in the collapse of Germany, and good news from Europe smiled upon us every morning at breakfast. Now we were tired and over-wrought. Good news there was none—indeed every day brought disastrous tidings. We, ourselves, must look back upon a hundred ...

— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole

... form decided on. At an appointed signal the end of the coffin, which is placed just within the opening in the shrine, is removed, and the body is drawn rapidly but gently and without exposure into the sarcophagus: the sides of the coffin, constructed for the purpose, collapse; and the wooden box is removed to be ...

— The Recreations of A Country Parson • A. K. H. Boyd

... and fought where it stood. The enemy, worn out by his exertions, stretched his line of communications to breaking-point, and it was said that his supplies of food and munitions had come temporarily very near to collapse. The Allies checked him. He could not even hold his own. In two days he was ...

— "Contemptible" • "Casualty"

... Winesburg, Ohio could be described as "antirealistic," fictions notable less for precise locale and social detail than for a highly personal, even strange vision of American life. Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live. It would be a gross mistake, though not one likely to occur by now, if we were to take ...

— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson

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