Bombshell

How to spell bombshell

9 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce bombshell

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does bombshell mean?

1. nounA piece of sudden, devastating or completely unexpected news.
2. nounInformal term for a strikingly attractive and glamorous person, especially a woman.

Bombshell in a sentence

• The chief executive dropped a bombshell when she announced her immediate resignation.

• The magazine described the actress as the blonde bombshell of the era.

• The audit results were a financial bombshell that nobody on the board had anticipated.

• She arrived at the premiere looking every inch the silver-screen bombshell.

Where does bombshell come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This is a compound of two older English words, bomb and shell. The first part, bomb, came into English in the late 1600s from the French bombe and the Italian bomba, which trace back to the Latin bombus, meaning a deep booming or buzzing sound; that Latin word in turn echoed the Greek bombos, used for a hollow, low noise, so the word was originally about the roar an explosive makes rather than the device itself. The second part, shell, is a native Germanic word from Old English sciell, meaning a hard outer casing such as a nut shell or seashell, which is why an artillery projectile, a hollow case packed with explosive, was named a shell. Put together, a bombshell was first literally an exploding artillery shell. By the early twentieth century the figurative sense took over, describing a piece of news so sudden and shocking that it lands like a detonating shell, and the playful nickname for a strikingly glamorous woman, the blonde bombshell, followed in the 1930s.

How the word is built

• bomb (explosive device, from Latin bombus: a booming sound)
• shell (hard casing, from Old English sciell)