Other forms: calamities
A calamity is a disaster that brings great distress. A national calamity, avert a calamity, calamity struck.
It is formal and slightly old-fashioned, and it tends to be used either seriously about genuine disasters or comically about small ones — the calamity of a burst pipe. Calamitous is the adjective and is stronger than disastrous in tone. Note that calamity is one of a set of near-synonyms — catastrophe, disaster, calamity, cataclysm — which shade from the merely bad to the world-ending, and are almost never used with that precision.
1nouncalamityA disaster that brings great distress.
“Losing our passports on the first day of the holiday was a calamity.”
calamity is a disaster.
ca-LAM-ity → a LAMB
One lamb wanders onto the track, and by the end of the afternoon two trains and a bridge are gone and nobody can explain how.
hooks ontolamb
Latin calamitas meant damage or loss, and one old suggestion links it to calamus, a stalk of corn — a blighted crop. The link is doubtful, which is fitting for a word about things going wrong.
Proto-Indo-European
*kelh₂-
Latin
calamitās — loss, damage; disaster
Middle French
calamité
English, today
calamity
From Middle French calamité, from Latin calamitās (“loss, damage; disaster”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA