Crashes

How to spell crashes

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crashes

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crashes mean?

1. verbCollides violently, falls heavily, or (of a computer) suddenly stops working.
2. nounPlural of crash: violent collisions, sudden failures, or financial collapses.

Crashes in a sentence

• verb

  The laptop crashes every time she opens that file.

• noun

  The number of motorway crashes rose sharply over the icy weekend.

• verb

  If the lorry crashes into the barrier, the road will close for hours.

• noun

  Frequent software crashes forced the team to roll back the update.

Where does crashes come from?

Language of origin: Other

The base word 'crash' first appears in Middle English as 'crasschen', and it is what linguists call an imitative or echoic word: its very sound was meant to mimic the loud, sudden noise of things breaking or smashing together. It may have been reinforced by a blend of 'crack' and 'dash', two words with similarly abrupt sound qualities. From naming the noise itself, 'crash' broadened to mean any violent collision, then later, in the financial world of the 1800s, a sudden collapse of markets, and in the computing age of the late twentieth century, an abrupt failure of a machine or program. The form 'crashes' simply adds the regular '-es' ending used after the 'sh' sound, giving the plural noun and the third-person verb. Because the spelling is so phonetically regular, the only point worth noting is that words ending in 'sh' take '-es' rather than a plain '-s'.

How the word is built

• crash (imitative root)
• -es (plural noun / third-person verb suffix)