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hemoclysm

hemoclysm noun: a violent and bloody conflict, a bloodbath; specifically (chiefly with capital initial), the period of the mid-twentieth century encompassing both world wars.

Noun

hemoclysm (plural hemoclysms)

  1. A violent and bloody conflict, a bloodbath; specifically (chiefly with capital initial), the period of the mid-twentieth century encompassing both world wars.
    • It's very possible, therefore, that future historians will consider these events to be mere episodes of a single massive upheaval -- the "Hemoclysm", to give it a name (Greek for "blood flood") -- which took the lives of some 155 million people.1998, Matthew White, “30 Worst Atrocities of the 20th Century”, in Twentieth Century Atlas
    • In 1911, the Eastern hemoclysm, a Greek term for "blood flood," began with the ousting of the Manchu dynasty in China, leading to thirty-eight years of Civil War and a Japanese invasion.2001, Cheryl A. Kirk-Duggan, Misbegotten Anguish, page 67

Examples of hemoclysm in a sentence

  • ‘The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history’ […] The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th, or by a mention of the hemoclysms of centuries past.2011, Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, Penguin 2012, page 233:
  • During the early phase of the Hemoclysm war still possessed a thin veneer of glory, soldiers dying with greater frequency than the unarmed masses of civilians.2013, Carl Mosk, Nationalism and Economic Development in Modern Asia, page 233:

Forms of hemoclysm

pluralhemoclysms

Origin of hemoclysm

Coined by Matthew White (a historian) (see citation 1998, below), from hemo- + Ancient Greek κλυσμός (klusmós, “wash; flood”).

Questions about hemoclysm

What does hemoclysm mean?
Hemoclysm means a violent and bloody conflict, a bloodbath; specifically (chiefly with capital initial), the period of the mid-twentieth century encompassing both world wars.
How do you use hemoclysm in a sentence?
‘The twentieth century was the bloodiest in history’ […] The claim is rarely backed up by numbers from any century other than the 20th, or by a mention of the hemoclysms of centuries past.
What part of speech is hemoclysm?
Hemoclysm is a noun.
What is the plural of hemoclysm?
The plural of hemoclysm is hemoclysms.

Words near hemoclysm in the dictionary

  1. hemochromogen
  2. hemocidin
  3. hemocidins
  4. hemoclip
  5. hemoclips
  6. hemoclysm
  7. hemoclysms
  8. hemocoagulase
  9. hemocoagulation
  10. hemocoagulative
  11. hemocoel

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: hemoclysm (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Cite this entry: “hemoclysm.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/hemoclysm. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.