deluge

UK/ˈdɛl.juː(d)ʒ/US/ˈdɛl.ju(d)ʒ/

nounC1Occasional — familiar, but not everyday · #11,276 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: deluges

A deluge is a great flood, or an overwhelming rush of things. A deluge of rain, a deluge of complaints, after the deluge.

With a capital letter the Deluge is Noah's flood, which is where the weight of the word comes from. The figurative use is now the commoner: a deluge of emails is more than could be dealt with by anybody.

Definitions of deluge

1noundelugeA great flood, or an overwhelming rush of things.C1
“The deluge washed away bridges and flooded hundreds of homes.”

deluge is a flood.

Where it comes from

Latin diluvium means a flood, from diluere, to wash away.

Proto-Indo-European
*lewh₃-
Middle English
deluge
English, today
deluge

Built from

dīluō · Latin — wash away

From Middle English deluge. From Middle English deluge, from Old French deluge, alteration of earlier deluvie, from Latin dīluvium, from dīluō (“wash away”). a doublet of diluvium.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

deluge in the wild

The Black Sea deluge is the best known of three hypothetical flood scenarios for the Late Quaternary history of the Black Sea that have been proposed since 1997.
Black Sea deluge hypothesis
Cobham Brewer in the forms "When I am dead the deluge may come for aught I care", and "Ruin, if you like, when we are dead and gone".
Après moi, le déluge
The Zanclean flood, or Zanclean deluge, is theorized to have refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5.33 million years ago.
Zanclean flood

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

Related words

the dīluō family

deluge antediluvian

deluge — used about once every 8,568 pages · #11,276 · point at the bar for the others

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