avalanche

noun

1. A large mass or body of snow and ice sliding swiftly down a mountain side, or falling down a precipice.

   “They were drinking from a fountain / That was pouring like an avalanche / Coming down the mountain”

2. A fall of earth, rocks, etc., similar to that of an avalanche of snow or ice.
3. (broadly)A sudden, great, or irresistible descent or influx; anything like an avalanche in suddenness and overwhelming quantity.

   “Yes, but she talked it away. She uses a whole language to herself. Her discourse is an avalanche of words, beneath which the hearers are overwhelmed.”

   “I stepped into an avalanche, it covered up my soul”

   “The apparent success of the City and South London triggered an avalanche of bills for Tube railways, and in 1892 a Joint Select Committee of Parliament set out some ground rules.”

verb

1. (intransitive)To descend like an avalanche.

   “Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—”

   “As it happened, I had progressed only some few feet out onto the snow when a clean-cut section stripped off the surface and avalanched.”

2. (transitive)To come down upon; to overwhelm.

   “The shelf broke and the boxes avalanched the workers.”

   “The applications were doubtless snowed under in the maze of official correspondence which avalanched the new government.”

3. (transitive)To propel downward like an avalanche.

   “When our artist and I were dropped down our first coal-mine, we felt a leetle bit anxious. It was something new. But we have been avalanched down the incline from Peak Forest, and boomeranged round the sudden curve at Rowsley, and have run the gauntlet at Penistone and King’s Cross without ever taking the precaution to say “God help us.””

   “The scuppers could not carry off the burden of water on the schooner’s deck. She rolled it out and took it in over one rail and the other; and at times, nose thrown skyward, sitting down on her heel, she avalanched it aft.”

   “Then another misfortune avalanched itself upon me, before even I had fully taken in the extent of the first.”

   “Swelter, following at high speed, had caught his toe at the raised lip of the opening, and unable to check his momentum, had avalanched himself into warm water.”