"doomsday device" meaning in English

See doomsday device in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Forms: doomsday devices [plural]
Etymology: Coined as Doomsday Machine by military strategist Herman Kahn. Etymology templates: {{m|en|Doomsday Machine}} Doomsday Machine Head templates: {{en-noun}} doomsday device (plural doomsday devices)
  1. A hypothetical weapon (often a bomb) programmed to automatically be used in response to certain attacks, usually with very dire consequences (such as the annihilation of the world). Categories (topical): Explosives, Nuclear warfare Synonyms: doomsday weapon, Doomsday Device Related terms: nuclear deterrent, Dr. Strangelove
    Sense id: en-doomsday_device-en-noun-5BpPnzI2 Disambiguation of Explosives: 67 33 Disambiguation of Nuclear warfare: 75 25 Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with topic categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 55 45 Disambiguation of English entries with topic categories using raw markup: 69 31 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 61 39
  2. An extremely powerful weapon.
    Sense id: en-doomsday_device-en-noun-EVZ5OrEM

Inflected forms

Alternative forms

Download JSON data for doomsday device meaning in English (3.3kB)

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          "kind": "topical",
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          "ref": "1964, Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, Peter George, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, spoken by Narrator",
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        {
          "ref": "2008 April 27, Ben Stein, “Wall Street, Run Amok”, in The New York Times, →ISSN",
          "text": "Of course, Henry M. Paulson Jr., the Treasury secretary, is calling for merging the S.E.C. with the easygoing Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in the financial equivalent of setting off a Doomsday Device.",
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This page is a part of the kaikki.org machine-readable English dictionary. This dictionary is based on structured data extracted on 2024-05-06 from the enwiktionary dump dated 2024-05-02 using wiktextract (f4fd8c9 and c9440ce). The data shown on this site has been post-processed and various details (e.g., extra categories) removed, some information disambiguated, and additional data merged from other sources. See the raw data download page for the unprocessed wiktextract data.

If you use this data in academic research, please cite Tatu Ylonen: Wiktextract: Wiktionary as Machine-Readable Structured Data, Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC), pp. 1317-1325, Marseille, 20-25 June 2022. Linking to the relevant page(s) under https://kaikki.org would also be greatly appreciated.