[ad. Gr. κατάκλασμα breakage, f. κατα-κλᾶν to break down, break off.] A break or disruption.
1829. Southey, Sir T. More, II. 201. The cataclasms of the moral and social world. Ibid. (1834), Doctor, cxxiii. (1862), 304. The history of the human race is but a parenthesis between two cataclasms of the globe which it inhabits.
1870. Bowen, Logic, ix. 301. To suppose that there was any cataclasm, any violent disruption of what is the usual course of nature in our own days.
Hence Cataclasmic a.
1888. H. S. Holland, Christ or Eccles., 37. Something abrupt, violent, cataclasmic.
