overburst

English

Etymology

over- +‎ burst

Noun

overburst (plural overbursts)

1. (rare) An excessively intense burst; a superburst.
   • 1904, William Douglas O'Connor, Heroes of the Storm‎^[1], Houghton, Mifflin and Company, page 88:

     On the less inundated ground the danger continued, the wreck stuff assuming here partly the character of missiles, a sudden overburst of the sea, half carrying on the water, half flinging through the air great sticks of wood upon the crew. Several of the men were knocked down by these flying pieces.

   • 1917, American Lumberman 1917-10-20: Issue 2214‎^[2], Vance Publishing Corporation, page 50:

     Factories enjoying overbursts of good times were in evidence and no one had to pity the unemployed, because of the absence of idle people.

   • 1968, Theodore Harold White, The Making of the President‎^[3], J. Cape, page 361:

     But, on departing, memory said that something was lacking—the wildness of enthusiasm that one remembered of other campaigns, the shriekings, the squealings, the jumpings, the mad roar of American politics when it is wild. And as the plane pulled up, and one passed over the twinkling paths of Las Vegas, the arteries of the pleasure capital of the West, they finked to all the other scenes one had seen across the country with the candidates: the nation bursting with an overburst of prosperity — the new schools, the new plazas, the new clearings for urban development, the great new auditoria and halls of a nation that had mounted crest after crest of prosperity and achievement in eight Democratic years.

   • 1987, James M. Mellard, Doing Tropology: Analysis of Narrative Discourse‎^[4], University of Illinois Press, →ISBN, page 101:

     It is as if "the path at the instant when he came in sight of me," she says, "had been a swamp ouf of which he had emerged without having been forewarned that he was about to enter light...it was not love... just a sudden overburst of light, illumination (p. 163).

   • 2008, David Gunn, Death's Head‎^[5], Ballantine Books, page 78:

     I put an overburst above where I think the belt-fed gun is sighted.