Word.ws English Dictionary

spaghettify

spaghettify verb: to stretch an object into a long thin shape under the influence of a very strong gravitational field gradient, such as found near a black hole.

Verb

spaghettify (third-person singular simple present spaghettifies, present participle spaghettifying, simple past and past participle spaghettified)

  1. (ambitransitive) To stretch an object into a long thin shape under the influence of a very strong gravitational field gradient, such as found near a black hole.
    • If, for example, a black hole eats enough to triple its mass, then it will have grown three times as wide. For this reason, black holes in the universe can be almost any size, but not all of them will spaghettify you before you cross the event horizon.2007, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Death by Black Hole
    • First, the intense gravitational forces around a black hole may 'spaghettify' space travellers before they even reach the event horizon, and second, the theory may be fully confirmed only if someone were prepared to test it.2013, David Wilkinson, Science, Religion, and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence

Forms of spaghettify

third-person singular presentspaghettifies
present participlespaghettifying
past participlespaghettified
pastspaghettified

Origin of spaghettify

Back-formation from spaghettification, equivalent to spaghetti + -fy.

Questions about spaghettify

What does spaghettify mean?
Spaghettify means to stretch an object into a long thin shape under the influence of a very strong gravitational field gradient, such as found near a black hole.
What part of speech is spaghettify?
Spaghettify is a verb.
What is the past tense of spaghettify?
The past tense of spaghettify is spaghettified.

Words near spaghettify in the dictionary

  1. spaghettificates
  2. spaghettificating
  3. spaghettification
  4. spaghettified
  5. spaghettifies
  6. spaghettify
  7. spaghettifying
  8. spaghettiing
  9. spaghettiless
  10. spaghettilike
  11. spaghettini

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: spaghettify (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.

Last updated:

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