- 1災難性的；毀滅性的
Catastrophic describes something that goes wrong in the biggest, worst possible way — much stronger than just "bad" or "serious." A catastrophic flood doesn't just cause a little damage, it destroys whole towns. People also use it a little more lightly these days, saying things like "this meeting was catastrophic" when they just mean it went really badly, not that anyone was hurt.
From the word’s history
Learned borrowing from Greek katastrophikós; by surface analysis catastrophe + -ic.
借自希臘文，也可看成 catastrophe 加 -ic。
組成Comes from "catastrophe," a very bad and sudden disaster. The "-ic" ending turns it into an adjective, like "basic" from "base."
同家族的字
- catastrophethe noun this adjective describes — a sudden, terrible disaster
原始詞典資料3 筆記錄
以下是外部詞典記錄的用法，摘錄並精簡格式，我們還沒有寫成教學內容。上面的說明才是我們自己寫的；有些用法可能上面已經講過了。
catastrophicadj/kætəˈstɹɒfɪk/
- 1
Of or pertaining to a catastrophe.
- 2
Disastrous; ruinous.
- The reason why Jon & Kate Plus 8 is such a hot topic is because it might all be a sham. It’s been claimed that Jon has a string of mistresses, that Kate had an affair with her bodyguard and that Baby Number Six is actually a shaved Ewok with a catastrophic heroin addiction. Or something.
- Some experts, such as geographer Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, “Collapse,” used Easter Island as a cautionary tale of how the exploitation of limited resources can result in catastrophic population decline, ecological devastation and the destruction of a society through infighting.
- 3
From which recovery is impossible.
- catastrophic failure
摘錄自 英文維基詞典 English Wiktionary，已精簡格式；依 CC BY-SA 4.0 授權使用，改動後的內容同樣以此授權提供。