"perfect storm" meaning in English

See perfect storm in All languages combined, or Wiktionary

Noun

Audio: En-au-perfect storm.ogg [Australia] Forms: perfect storms [plural]
Head templates: {{en-noun}} perfect storm (plural perfect storms)
  1. (meteorology, informal) A powerful hurricane or other major weather disturbance, especially as produced by a combination of meteorological conditions. Tags: informal Categories (topical): Meteorology
    Sense id: en-perfect_storm-en-noun-GOaDyVyp Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 48 52 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 54 46 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 47 53 Topics: climatology, meteorology, natural-sciences
  2. (figuratively, by extension) A situation in which several problems converge and make everything worse. Tags: broadly, figuratively Translations (situation): Verkettung unglücklicher Umstände [feminine] (German), tormenta perfecta [feminine] (Spanish), perfekt storm [common-gender] (Swedish)
    Sense id: en-perfect_storm-en-noun-LByCl5Yk Categories (other): English entries with incorrect language header, English entries with language name categories using raw markup, English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys Disambiguation of English entries with incorrect language header: 48 52 Disambiguation of English entries with language name categories using raw markup: 54 46 Disambiguation of English terms with non-redundant non-automated sortkeys: 47 53 Disambiguation of 'situation': 4 96

Inflected forms

Download JSON data for perfect storm meaning in English (4.4kB)

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          "text": "1796, William Fordyce Mavor, Historical account of the most celebrated voyages, travels, and discoveries ..., p. 161,\nBut on the 24th of April, the wind again blew a perfect storm, and our other ships of the squadron separated, nor did any of them rejoin the commodore."
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          "text": "1914, Samuel Finley Breese Morse and Edward Lind Morse, Samuel F.B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, p. 190,\nTen o'clock. Beginning to blow hard; taking in sails one after another. — Three o'clock. A perfect storm; the gale a few days ago but a gentle breeze to it."
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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 2024-05-03 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.