Vertiginous describes something so high, so steep, or so fast that just being near it makes your head swim and your stomach turn — the cliff path is vertiginous, the drop below the balcony is vertiginous. It is a formal, written word; you meet it in travel writing, novels, and news articles, almost never in daily conversation, where people say *dizzying* or just *really high*. Notice that it can point two ways. Usually it describes the thing that causes the feeling (a vertiginous staircase). Sometimes it describes the feeling itself (a vertiginous sense of falling). Writers also stretch it away from height altogether, to anything that rises or drops shockingly fast: a vertiginous rise in house prices, a vertiginous fall in a company's share price. That business use is now very common — arguably more common in newspapers than the cliff-edge one — and it keeps the flavour of "so steep it frightens you".

令人暈眩的；（高得）叫人頭暈目眩的。也常用來形容漲跌陡到嚇人，例如「房價暴漲」的那種陡度