implosion

[im-ploh-zhuh n] /ɪmˈploʊ ʒən/
noun
1.
the act of imploding; a bursting inward (opposed to explosion).
2.
Phonetics.
  1. the occlusive phase of stop consonants.
  2. (of a stop consonant) the nasal release heard in the common pronunciation of eaten, sudden, or mitten, in which the vowel of the final syllable is greatly reduced.
  3. the ingressive release of a suction stop.
    Compare plosion.
Origin
1875-80; im-1 + (ex)plosion
Examples from the web for implosion
  • Some who foresaw the implosion underestimated its power and duration.
  • None of these attempts survived the dot-com implosion.
  • Cavitation-bubble implosion-can make pieces of steel look as if they've been pummeled by artillery.
  • The implosion of the core causes it to rotate rapidly, up to hundreds of times per second.
  • There is a video of a building whose implosion went wrong, and it stayed up, albeit leaning.
  • The first stages of a political implosion are equal parts theater, sport, and fantasy.
  • The inevitable, debt-fueled implosion occurred three years later.
  • Now he's playing for a ring while his former team deals with the aftermath of its implosion.
  • But that all changed with the implosion of the two hedge funds this summer.
  • The belief that such regimes need only a small shock to cause their implosion is probably wishful thinking.
British Dictionary definitions for implosion

implosion

/ɪmˈpləʊʒən/
noun
1.
the act or process of imploding: the implosion of a light bulb
2.
(phonetics) the suction or inhalation of breath employed in the pronunciation of an ingressive consonant
Word Origin and History for implosion
n.

"a bursting inward," 1829, modeled on explosion, with assimilated form of in- "into, in, on, upon" (see in- (2)).

And to show how entire the neglect and confusion have been, they speak in the same breath of all these explosions, and of the explosion of a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, the result of which, instead of being a gas or an enlargement of bulk, a positive quantity, is a negative one. It is a vacuum, in a popular sense, because the produce is water. The result is an implosion (to coin a word), not an explosion .... ["Gas-light," "Westminster Review," October 1829]
In early use often in reference to effect of deep sea pressures, or in phonetics. Figurative sense is by 1960.

implosion in Medicine

implosion im·plo·sion (ĭm-plō'zhən)
n.

  1. A type of behavior therapy in which the patient is repeatedly subjected to anxiety-arousing stimuli while the therapist attempts to extinguish the patient's anxiety and anxious behavior and replace them with more appropriate responses.

  2. A bursting inward rather than outward.