Avalanche

How to spell avalanche

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce avalanche

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does avalanche mean?

1. nounA large mass of snow, ice, and rock sliding rapidly down a mountainside.
2. nounA sudden, overwhelming quantity of something arriving all at once.

Avalanche in a sentence

• The ski resort closed the upper slopes after an avalanche buried the access road.

• The new product launch triggered an avalanche of customer enquiries.

• Rescuers used trained dogs to search the snow after the avalanche.

• After the news broke, the office faced an avalanche of phone calls and emails.

Where does avalanche come from?

Language of origin: French

This word came into English in the early 1700s straight from French, where avalanche described a mass of snow sliding down a mountain. The French form grew out of an Alpine dialect word, probably from the Savoyard or Romansh region, and it was reshaped by association with the French verb avaler, which originally meant 'to go down' (literally 'to the valley', from à val). Over time avaler shifted to mean 'to swallow', but the older 'go down' sense is what survives in avalanche. English first used it for the literal snow slides of the Alps, then quickly extended it to mean any sudden overwhelming rush of things. The spelling trap lives in that French ending: the silent, soft '-anche' and the single 'l' both tempt writers into doubling letters or writing '-anch'.

How the word is built

• a- (from French à val: to the valley)
• val (valley)
• -anche (noun ending)