Advertisement

implosion (n.)

"a bursting inward, a sudden collapse," 1829, modeled on explosion, with assimilated form of in- "into, in, on, upon" (from PIE root *en "in").

And to show how entire the neglect and confusion have been, they speak in the same breath of all these explosions, and of the explosion of a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen, the result of which, instead of being a gas or an enlargement of bulk, a positive quantity, is a negative one. It is a vacuum, in a popular sense, because the produce is water. The result is an implosion (to coin a word), not an explosion .... ["Gas-light," Westminster Review, October 1829]

In early use often in reference to effect of deep sea pressures, or in phonetics. Figurative sense is by 1960.

Others are reading

Advertisement
Definitions of implosion from WordNet

implosion (n.)
a sudden inward collapse;
the implosion of a light bulb
implosion (n.)
the initial occluded phase of a stop consonant;
From wordnet.princeton.edu