Climactic means forming the most intense point of a story or an event. The climactic scene, a climactic moment, climactic finish.
It is a different word from climatic, which means to do with the weather, and the two are swapped constantly. In a story the climactic scene is where the tension breaks, not where it ends.
1adjectiveclimacticForming the most intense point of a story or an event.
“In the climactic final battle, the hero at last comes face to face with his enemy.”
climactic is a quality.
From climax, by analogy with words such as syntactic, from Greek klimax, a ladder.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱley-
Ancient Greek
κλῖμαξ — ladder, staircase, [rhetorical] climax
Latin
clīmax
English
climax
English, today
climactic
Built from
From climax + -ic. on analogy of syntactic. climax comes from Latin clīmax, from Ancient Greek κλῖμαξ (“ladder, staircase, [rhetorical] climax”), from κλίνω (“to lean, slant”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA