debacle
debacles
Use debacle to refer to a fiasco, disaster, or great failure. If several dogs run onto the field during the big baseball game, tripping players and chewing up the bases, you can call the whole event a debacle.
Debacle is sometimes used to describe a military defeat. If your army retreats, that's one thing. If your army is outmaneuvered and ends up huddled in a valley, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, forced to sing 90s sitcom theme songs by their savage captors — that's a debacle. Debacle comes from the French débâcler, "to clear," — the prefix des- means "completely, utterly" and the verb bacler means "to block."
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a sudden and violent collapse
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flooding caused by a tumultuous breakup of ice in a river during the spring or summer
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type of:
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alluvion, deluge, flood, inundation
the rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto normally dry land
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alluvion, deluge, flood, inundation
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a sound defeat
Vocabulary lists containing debacle
When twelve-year-old Sophie Brown moves from a California city to a farm her dad has inherited, she is determined to learn how to raise the chickens she finds.
This biography chronicles the life of Sojourner Truth, a woman who was born a slave, and who became the embodiment of the universal ideals of abolition and equality.
Biographer Frank Brady chronicles the meteoric rise and astounding fall of chess prodigy Bobby Fischer.
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