Outburst

How to spell outburst

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce outburst

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does outburst mean?

1. nounA sudden and forceful release of strong feeling, such as anger, laughter, or tears.
2. nounA sudden and intense increase in activity, energy, or output.

Outburst in a sentence

• His angry outburst during the meeting left everyone stunned.

• The team produced an outburst of work to meet the deadline.

• A sudden outburst of laughter swept through the audience.

• A brief outburst of energy carried him up the final hill.

Where does outburst come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a transparent compound of the everyday words 'out' and 'burst', both of which are native to English. The first element comes from Old English 'ut', meaning 'outward' or 'forth', the same particle seen in countless verbs like 'outrun' and 'outlast'. The second comes from Old English 'berstan', meaning 'to break suddenly' or 'to shatter', a word with deep Germanic roots that also gave German 'bersten'. The two were joined to describe something that breaks forth all at once, and from the 1650s onward 'outburst' settled into its modern sense of a sudden eruption, first of physical force and then, very commonly, of feeling. Because both parts are familiar and spelled exactly as they sound, the spelling carries no hidden traps; the only thing to remember is that it is written as one solid word, not two.

How the word is built

• out- (out, forth)
• burst (a sudden breaking forth, from Old English berstan)