Climax

How to spell climax

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce climax

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does climax mean?

1. nounThe most intense, exciting, or important point of something, reached after a gradual build-up.
2. verbTo reach the highest or most intense point of a process or event.

Climax in a sentence

• noun

  The trial reached its climax when the final witness testified.

• verb

  The festival will climax with a concert on the final night.

• noun

  The firework display built slowly toward a dazzling climax.

• verb

  The campaign is set to climax at the rally next week.

Where does climax come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the Greek klimax, which literally meant 'a ladder' or 'a staircase'. Greek rhetoricians borrowed that image of climbing rung by rung to name a figure of speech in which ideas are arranged in rising order of intensity, each one stronger than the last. Latin took the term over unchanged as climax, and English adopted it in the sixteenth century, at first only as a technical term in rhetoric. Over time the meaning shifted from the whole ascending arrangement to the single high point at the top of it, giving us the modern sense of a peak or culmination. The Greek root is the same one that lies behind 'climate', because ancient geographers spoke of the 'slope' or inclination of the earth toward the poles, and that 'kli-' beginning, glossed as leaning or sloping, is worth remembering to keep the spelling steady.

How the word is built

• climax (from Greek klimax: ladder, the original sense of a rising series); no separable prefix or suffix in English