Other forms: climaxes
The climax is the most intense point of a story or an event. The climax of the film, build to a climax, an anticlimax.
In a narrative it is the point of greatest tension, after which everything resolves. In music it is the loudest and most intense passage. An anticlimax is a disappointing ending after a build-up, and it is a very useful word. Note that climax also has a sexual sense; and that in Greek rhetoric climax meant a ladder of phrases each stronger than the last, which is the original technical meaning.
1nounclimaxThe most intense point of a story or an event.
“The climax of the film is a car chase through the streets of Paris.”
climax is a point of greatest intensity.
Greek klimax means a ladder. A rhetorical climax was a series of steps rising in force, and English took the ladder's top step and threw the rest of it away.
Proto-Indo-European
*ḱley-
Ancient Greek
κλῖμαξ — ladder, staircase, [rhetorical] climax
Latin
clīmax
English, today
climax
Built from
From Latin clīmax, from Ancient Greek κλῖμαξ (“ladder, staircase, [rhetorical] climax”), from κλίνω (“to lean, slant”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA