crash

Webster's Dictionary (1913)

Origin: OE. crashen, the same word as crasen to break, E. craze. See Craze.

To break in pieces violently; to dash together with noise and violence. rare

He shakt his head, and crasht his teeth for ire.— Edward Fairfax

1. To make a loud, clattering sound, as of many things falling and breaking at once; to break in pieces with a harsh noise.

Roofs were blazing and walls crashing in every part of the city.— Thomas Babington Macaulay

2. To break with violence and noise; as, the chimney in falling crashed through the roof.

1. A loud, sudden, confused sound, as of many things falling and breaking at once.

The wreck of matter and the crash of worlds.— Joseph Addison

2. Ruin; failure; sudden breaking down, as of a business house or a commercial enterprise; as, the stock market crash of 1929.

The last week of October 1929 remains forever imprinted in the American memory. It was, of course, the week of the Great Crash, the stock market collapse that signaled the collapse of the world economy and the Great Depression of the 1930s. From an all-time high of 381 in early September 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average drifted down to a level of 326 on October 22, then, in a series of traumatic selling waves, to 230 in the course of the following six trading days. The stock market's drop was far from over; it continued its sickening slide for nearly three more years, reaching an ultimate low of 41 in July 1932. But it was that last week of October 1929 that burned itself into the American consciousness. After a decade of unprecedented boom and prosperity, there suddenly was panic, fear, a yawning gap in the American fabric. The party was over.— Wall street Journal, October 28, 1977.

Origin: L. crassus coarse. See Crass.

Coarse, heavy, narrow linen cloth, used esp. for towels.

Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913), from GCIDE 0.54 · with additions: GCIDE editors

Free On-line Dictionary of Computing

1.A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system, especially of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a "head crash", whereas the term "system crash" usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.

2.To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system." [Jargon File]

(1994-12-01)

The Jargon File

1.n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). “Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash.” A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a head crash, whereas the term system crash usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.

2.v. To fail suddenly. “Has the system just crashed?” “Something crashed the OS!” See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). “Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system.”

3.vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long hacking run ; see gronk out.