Crater

How to spell crater

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce crater

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does crater mean?

1. nounA large bowl-shaped cavity in the ground, especially the mouth of a volcano or a hollow made by an impact or explosion.
2. verbTo collapse inward or fall sharply, often suddenly and dramatically.

Crater in a sentence

• noun

  The meteorite left a deep crater in the desert floor.

• verb

  Share prices began to crater after the disappointing earnings report.

• noun

  Tourists hiked to the rim of the volcanic crater at dawn.

• verb

  The old roof started to crater under the weight of the snow.

Where does crater come from?

Language of origin: Greek

This word comes from the ancient Greek krater, which named a large open bowl in which the Greeks mixed their wine with water before serving it at a feast. The root idea was 'a vessel for mixing', and the verb kerannynai, 'to mix', sits behind it. Latin took the word over as crater, keeping the sense of a deep, rounded bowl, and from there it passed into English in the early 1600s. Astronomers and naturalists soon borrowed the image for any bowl-shaped hollow, first for the open mouth of a volcano and later for the round scars that meteor impacts leave on planets and moons. The spelling stays close to the Greek and Latin form, which is why it ends in -er rather than the -or that some similar words take.

How the word is built

• crater (from Greek krater: mixing bowl), borrowed whole with no prefix or suffix