Upheaval

How to spell upheaval

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce upheaval

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does upheaval mean?

1. nounA great or sudden disturbance that radically changes a settled situation.
2. nounThe upward displacement of part of the earth's surface by geological forces.

Upheaval in a sentence

• The merger caused major upheaval across the entire company.

• The mountain range was formed by a slow upheaval of the seabed over millions of years.

• Moving to a new country was a huge emotional upheaval for the family.

• Geologists studied the ancient upheaval that pushed the rock layers vertical.

Where does upheaval come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Upheaval is built from the verb upheave, which combines the directional element up with heave, a native English word descended from Old English hebban, meaning 'to lift, raise, or carry'. The same hebban root sits behind the modern verb 'heave', as in heaving a heavy load, and it shares deep Germanic ancestry with related lifting words in Dutch and German. Upheave originally described physically lifting or forcing something upward, and by the early 1800s geologists were using upheaval for the violent raising of the earth's crust into mountains and ridges. From that geological sense the word quickly broadened into its everyday figurative meaning of a sudden, sweeping disruption to a settled order or way of life. Because the second syllable carries the stress, the unstressed 'up' at the front and the silent 'a' before the final 'l' are the parts writers most often fumble.

How the word is built

• up- (upward)
• heav(e) (to lift or raise, from Old English hebban)
• -al (noun suffix)