Downburst

noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A powerful downward air current, especially one during a thunderstorm, often creating powerful divergent horizontal winds and strong wind shear upon impacting the surface.

Etymology

From down- + burst, coined by American meteorologist Horace R. Byers and Japanese and American meteorologist Tetsuya T. Fujita in November 1975.

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.