Thunderbolt

How to spell thunderbolt

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce thunderbolt

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does thunderbolt mean?

1. nounA flash of lightning together with the crash of thunder, imagined as a dart hurled from the sky.
2. nounA sudden and unexpected event or piece of news that comes as a great shock.

Thunderbolt in a sentence

• A sudden thunderbolt split the old oak in the field.

• The merger announcement came as a complete thunderbolt to the staff.

• The storm sent a thunderbolt crashing across the valley.

• Her resignation was a thunderbolt that nobody had foreseen.

Where does thunderbolt come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Thunderbolt is a homegrown English compound, stitched together from two native Anglo-Saxon words. The first half, thunder, comes from the Old English thunor, the rumbling crash of a storm; it is closely related to the name of the Norse god Thor and to the German Donner. The second half, bolt, comes from the Old English bolt, which originally meant a short, heavy arrow shot from a crossbow. Joined together by the late Middle Ages, the word pictures a lightning flash as a fiery dart hurled down from the sky, an image that goes back to ancient depictions of sky gods flinging weapons of lightning. Because both parts are plain everyday words, the spelling is mercifully regular, with the only mild snag being the silent linking of thunder and bolt into a single solid word.

How the word is built

• thunder (loud sound of a storm, from Old English thunor)
• bolt (arrow or shaft, from Old English bolt)