Disaster
nounA sudden event causing great damage, loss, or misfortune.
How to spell disaster
8 letters · 3 syllables
How to pronounce disaster
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does disaster mean?
- nounA sudden event causing great damage, loss, or misfortune.
Disaster in a sentence
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The flood was a disaster for the families living near the river.
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Poor planning turned the launch into a complete disaster.
Where does disaster come from?
Language of origin: Italian
The word traces back to the Italian disastro, formed from the prefix dis- meaning 'bad' or 'ill' and astro meaning 'star', from the Latin astrum and ultimately the Greek astron, both meaning 'star'. The literal idea was an 'ill star' or unfavourable position of the heavens, reflecting the old belief that the stars and planets governed human fortune; a disaster was originally a calamity blamed on a bad astrological alignment. English borrowed it in the late 1500s, partly through the French desastre, and the astrological flavour quickly faded to leave the modern sense of any sudden great misfortune. The same astron root still shines in everyday relatives such as 'astronomy', 'astronaut', and 'asterisk', which all carry the 'star' idea. Remembering that hidden star, the 'aster' in the middle, helps explain the spelling, since the word is dis- plus aster plus a final -er.
How the word is built
- dis- (bad, ill)
- aster (star, from Latin astrum / Greek astron)
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