Crashing

How to spell crashing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crashing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crashing mean?

1. verbPresent participle of crash: colliding violently, falling noisily, or suddenly failing.
2. adjectiveUsed informally to mean thorough, complete, or overwhelming.

Crashing in a sentence

• verb

  The sound of waves crashing against the rocks kept her awake all night.

• adjective

  The lecture was a crashing bore, and half the audience left early.

• verb

  He stopped the car just before crashing into the barrier.

• adjective

  His attempt to win the contract ended in crashing failure.

Where does crashing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The base word 'crash' first appears in late Middle English, around the 1400s, as 'crasshen', and it is what linguists call an imitative or onomatopoeic word: the sound of the syllable itself was meant to suggest the loud, sudden noise of something shattering or smashing. It may have been influenced by older words such as 'craze' (to break) and 'mash' (to crush), blending their senses of breaking and pounding. Over time 'crash' broadened from the literal noise to mean a violent collision, and later still a sudden financial collapse or a computer failure. The form 'crashing' is simply the present participle, adding the regular '-ing' ending, and from there it took on a figurative life as an intensifier, as in 'a crashing bore', where it means thorough or overwhelming. The spelling is refreshingly phonetic, with the only point to watch being that the short 'a' is written with a single 'a' before the 'sh'.

How the word is built

• crash (imitative root: to break noisily)
• -ing (present participle / verbal suffix)