Outbreak
nounA sudden occurrence or eruption of something undesirable, such as disease, violence, or disorder.
How to spell outbreak
8 letters · 2 syllables
How to pronounce outbreak
Say the part in capitals loudest.
What does outbreak mean?
- nounA sudden occurrence or eruption of something undesirable, such as disease, violence, or disorder.
Outbreak in a sentence
-
The hospital reported a sudden outbreak of food poisoning among the guests.
-
Health officials traced the outbreak back to a contaminated water supply.
Where does outbreak come from?
Language of origin: Germanic
This word is a compound built from the native English elements 'out' and 'break'. The verb 'break' descends from Old English 'brecan', meaning to shatter, burst, or violate, a word shared across the Germanic family. From the 1400s onward English combined 'out' with various verbs to describe something bursting forth, and 'outbreak' emerged to mean a sudden eruption of something, originally physical breaking out and later figurative. By the 1600s it was applied to the sudden appearance of disease, war, or disorder, the dominant modern sense. The spelling is reassuringly transparent once you see it as 'out' plus 'break', which is why the tricky part is simply remembering it is a single closed word rather than two.
How the word is built
- out- (forth, outward)
- break (a bursting forth, from Old English brecan)
Fix your spelling for good.
Spelling Garden finds the words you personally get wrong, plants them in a garden, and brings each one back just before you would have forgotten it.
Just five minutes a day is all it takes to fix your spelling.