Other forms: avalanches
An avalanche is a huge mass of snow sliding suddenly down a mountainside. Caught in an avalanche, avalanche warning, trigger an avalanche.
Most are set off by the weight of the people caught in them. The slab avalanche, where a whole layer of snow releases at once, is the deadly kind. Avalanche risk is graded from one to five across the Alps, and transceivers, probes and shovels are standard equipment. Figuratively, an avalanche is an overwhelming quantity arriving at once: an avalanche of letters, an avalanche of criticism.
1nounavalancheA mass of snow sliding suddenly down a mountainside.
“The avalanche closed the road for nine days.”
2nounoverwhelmingAn overwhelming quantity arriving at once.
“There was an avalanche of complaints within the hour.”
avalanche is a sudden mass movement.
The word comes from a dialect of the French Alps, altered by the verb avaler, to descend. It is one of the very few English words to come straight from a mountain dialect rather than from a national language.
French
avalanche
English, today
avalanche
Built from
Borrowed from French avalanche. From French avalanche, from frp - (Savoy) avalançhe, blend of aval (“downhill”) and standard lavençhe, from Vulgar Latin labanka (compare Occitan lavanca, Italian valanga), of uncertain origin, perhaps an alteration of Latin lābīna (“landslide”) (compare Franco-Provençal (Dauphiné) lavino, rm lavina), from Latin lābēs, from lābor (“to slip, slide”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA