Smash

How to spell smash

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce smash

What does smash mean?

1. verbTo break something violently into pieces, or to strike it with great force.
2. nounA great popular success, especially a film, song, or show.

Smash in a sentence

• verb

  The burglar tried to smash the window to get inside.

• noun

  The band's debut single became an overnight smash across three continents.

• verb

  A single hailstone was enough to smash the greenhouse pane.

• noun

  Critics predicted the film would be the biggest box-office smash of the summer.

Where does smash come from?

Language of origin: Other

Smash is a relatively modern English word, first recorded in the early 1700s, and its origin is genuinely uncertain. The most widely accepted explanation is that it is an imitative or 'echoic' word, coined to capture the very sound of something being violently broken, much like crash, bash, and clash. Many scholars think it arose as a blend, fusing the sharpness of 'smack' with the crushing force of 'mash', so the word literally sounds like the action it names. There may also be an echo of Scandinavian forms such as the Swedish dialect 'smaska', meaning to smack or strike noisily, which fits the wider family of blunt, percussive English words. Because the word grew out of sound rather than a tidy classical root, its spelling is mercifully phonetic, with the 'sm' opening and the soft 'sh' ending both doing exactly what they look like.

How the word is built

• smash (single root; likely an imitative blend of 'smack' and 'mash')