Exploding

How to spell exploding

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce exploding

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does exploding mean?

1. verbBursting apart suddenly and violently, often with a loud noise.
2. verbIncreasing suddenly and dramatically in size, number, or intensity.

Exploding in a sentence

• The fireworks kept exploding over the harbour all evening.

• The report tracked the exploding demand for electric cars across the region.

• Witnesses heard the gas cylinder exploding shortly after the fire spread.

• Managers struggled to keep up with the exploding workload after the merger.

Where does exploding come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin verb explodere, which was built from ex-, meaning 'out', and plaudere, meaning 'to clap' or 'to applaud'. Strikingly, the original sense was theatrical: to explode a performer was to drive an actor off the stage by clapping mockingly, hissing, and hooting, that is, to jeer someone out of the building. From there English picked it up in the late 1500s with the figurative meaning of rejecting or discrediting an idea, and only in the 1700s did it shift toward the modern sense of bursting violently with a loud noise, as the noisy 'driving out' was reimagined as a sudden release of force. The same plaudere root survives in the everyday words 'applaud' and 'plausible', which is a useful reminder that the spelling keeps the 'plod' from clapping, not from plodding along. The present participle simply adds -ing to that older, surprisingly polite stage-craft heritage.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• plod (from Latin plaudere: to clap, to applaud)
• -ing (present participle)