Apocalypse

How to spell apocalypse

10 letters · 4 syllables

How to pronounce apocalypse

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does apocalypse mean?

1. nounA sudden, complete, and devastating destruction or end of the world.
2. nounA revelation or prophetic disclosure, especially the biblical vision of the end of the world.

Apocalypse in a sentence

• The film imagines a nuclear apocalypse that wipes out every major city.

• The medieval painting depicts the apocalypse as described in the final book of the Bible.

• Economists warned that a banking collapse could trigger a financial apocalypse.

• Her thesis examined how the apocalypse shaped early Christian art.

Where does apocalypse come from?

Language of origin: Greek

The word comes from the Greek apokalypsis, meaning an 'uncovering' or 'revelation', built from the verb apokalyptein, which literally meant 'to uncover' or 'to take the lid off something'. That verb joins apo, meaning 'away' or 'off', with kalyptein, meaning 'to cover' or 'to conceal', so the original sense was simply pulling the cover away to reveal what lies beneath. Early Christian writers used the Greek title for the last book of the New Testament, which in English is also called Revelation, because it claimed to disclose hidden divine truth about the end of the world. The word travelled into English through Late Latin apocalypsis and Old French apocalipse in the medieval period, keeping its religious meaning of a great revelation. Over time the dramatic, world-ending imagery of that biblical text overtook the literal 'uncovering' sense, so today the everyday meaning is a catastrophic, destructive end. The buried Greek kalyptein survives in the spelling as that tricky middle 'calyp', the same root that hides inside the plant word 'calyx', the protective covering of a flower bud.

How the word is built

• apo- (off, away, un-)
• kalyp (to cover, conceal, from Greek kalyptein)
• -sis/-se (noun ending)