debacle
Other forms: debacles
Use debacle to refer to a fiasco, disaster, or great failure. If several dogs run onto the field during the big baseball game, tripping players and chewing up the bases, you can call the whole event a debacle.
Debacle is sometimes used to describe a military defeat. If your army retreats, that's one thing. If your army is outmaneuvered and ends up huddled in a valley, surrounded on all sides by the enemy, forced to sing 90s sitcom theme songs by their savage captors — that's a debacle. Debacle comes from the French débâcler, "to clear," — the prefix des- means "completely, utterly" and the verb bacler means "to block."
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a sudden and violent collapse
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flooding caused by a tumultuous breakup of ice in a river during the spring or summertype of:alluvion, deluge, flood, inundationthe rising of a body of water and its overflowing onto normally dry land
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a sound defeat
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Vocabulary lists containing debacle
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After a shipwreck, Rainsford thinks he's safe when he washes ashore a mysterious island — but once he meets the eccentric General Zaroff, he realizes his problems have just begun. Read the full text here.