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ENGLISH · A WORD WITH POSSIBILITIES

explode.

To fly apart with sudden violent force; to blow up, to burst, to detonate, to go off.

7 characters2 syllables approx.English language

Meaning & usage

verb/ɪkˈspləʊd/UK/ɪkˈsploʊd/US
  1. To fly apart with sudden violent force; to blow up, to burst, to detonate, to go off.

    intransitive
    The bomb explodes.
  2. To destroy with an explosion.

    transitive
    The assassin exploded the car by means of a car bomb.
  3. To make a violent or emotional outburst; to suddenly give expression to powerful and often negative or unpleasant emotion, especially anger.

    figuratively · intransitive
    She exploded when I criticised her hat.
  4. To increase suddenly.

    figuratively · intransitive
  5. To increase arbitrarily or boundlessly.

    The function f(x) = 1/x explodes around x = 0.
  6. To destroy violently or abruptly.

    transitive
    They sought to explode the myth.
  7. To create an exploded view of.

    transitive
    Explode the assembly drawing so that all the fasteners are visible.
  8. To disprove or debunk.

    archaic · transitive
  9. To emerge suddenly.

    figuratively · intransitive
    to explode into the mainstream; to explode onto the scene
  10. To ejaculate.

    slang · vulgar
  11. To break (a delimited string of text) into several smaller strings by removing the separators.

  12. To decompress (data) that was previously imploded.

    transitive
  13. To open all doors and hatches on an automobile.

    transitive
  14. Of a die, to produce the highest face result and consequently reroll.

    intransitive
Where this word comes from

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰ Proto-Indo-European *-s Proto-Indo-European *h₁éǵʰs Proto-Italic *eks Latin ex Latin ex- Proto-Indo-European *pleth₂-? Proto-Indo-European *pel-? Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂- Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂-u-h₂- Proto-Indo-European *pleh₂-u-d- Latin plaudō Latin explōdōbor. English explode First recorded around 1538, from the Latin verb explōdere (“drive out or off by clapping”). The meaning was originally theatrical, "to drive an actor off the stage by making noise," hence meaning to "to drive out" or "to reject". From ex- (“out”) + plaudere (“to clap; to applaud”). In English it used to mean to "drive out with violence and sudden noise" (from around 1660), and later meaning to "go off with a loud noise" (from around 1790). The sense of "bursting with destructive force" is first recorded around 1882.

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Definitions, grammatical labels, IPA, etymology and examples: Wiktionary contributors, extracted by Kaikki / Wiktextract. Adapted under CC BY-SA 4.0. Selected fields and authored examples are shown; third-party quotations and audio are omitted. See contributor history.

Last enriched 2026-09-10. Definitions are in English. Romanizations are shown when supplied by the source; syllable estimates are omitted for unsupported scripts.