Other forms: crashed, crashes, crashing
A crash is the moment two things hit each other hard enough to break — cars at a junction, a plane coming down, a tray of glasses going over in a busy restaurant.
Crash is a verb as much as a noun: cars crash, waves crash on the rocks, a door crashes open at the back of the hall. From there the word has travelled a long way. Your computer crashes when it stops dead and takes the work with it; the market crashed in 1929 and pulled the banks down after it; you crash out of a tournament in the first round; and after a night shift you crash on a friend's sofa, which only means you sleep there. Say crash into something. Keep the word for the violent kind — a crash bends metal, while a bump in a car park is a bump.
1nouncrashA violent collision — vehicles hitting each other, or hitting the ground.~37%
“Three people were hurt in the crash on the motorway.”
2nounsoundThe loud noise of something heavy falling or breaking.~2%
“There was a crash in the kitchen and then silence.”
3verbhitTo hit something hard and be damaged or broken by it.~14%
“He crashed the van into a gate.”
4nounsuddenA sudden total failure — of a computer, or of prices on a market.~47%
“Save as you go; a crash can take an hour's work with it.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 97 of them on a sense (43 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: accident
Middle English crasshen meant to break into pieces, and where it came from before that nobody has settled. One suggestion on record is craken, to crack, to break open — the same word as crack. Either way, the earliest sense written down is the breaking, not the bang.
Middle English
crasshen
English, today
crash
Built from
From Middle English crasshen, crasschen, craschen (“to break into pieces”), of uncertain origin. Perhaps from a variant of earlier crasken, from crasen + k; or from earlier craskien, craksien, a variant of craken (“to crack, break open”) (for form development compare break, brask, brash).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA