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''maelstrom'' ▫ᴱᴺ｜Definition｜1st｜20260915190735-00-⌔

maelstrom - Wiktionary, the free dictionary

English

Noun

maelstrom (plural maelstroms)

  • A large and violent whirlpool.
    • ✤ To his right fell a gleaming sheet of water, and below it was a maelstrom, that made one giddy by its terrific gyrations.1
    • ✤ The falukah plunged over a waterfall and was almost submerged, was caught again in a maelstrom and went twirling on in the blackness.2
    • ✤ A hulking shape burst through the doorway and hurtled down the corridor, leaving a maelstrom of air currents in his wake.3
  • (figuratively) A chaotic or turbulent situation.
    • ✤ Synonym: pandemonium
    • ✤ It was of Jean Paul’s doing: some single billow in that vast World- Mahlstrom of Humour, with its heaven-kissing coruscations, which is now, alas, all congealed in the frost of death!4
    • ✤ He escaped at last, dizzy from the maelstrom of conflicting emotions that had caught and whirled him.5
    • ✤ The terminal station, Richmond, is managed by South West Trains, heirs to the London & South Western Railway, and here the District fades into a railway maelstrom, since Richmond is not only on the Waterloo-Reading line but is also the westerly terminus of the London Overground.6
    • ✤ A Twitter post intended to celebrate a funny photo of Abby, a “chonk” sea otter at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, instead stirred an online maelstrom of criticism, KNTV reports.7
    • ✤ An officer makes his way through the maelstrom to report a serious fire in one of the turrets. Rozhestvensky laconically orders him to try and put it out, as there isn’t much he can do from inside the conning tower.8
    • ✤ Setting our sights back on King’s Landing, where the Last War will be waged, makes a lot of sense, even if it does feel a bit anticlimactic after last week’s deadly, blustery maelstrom.9
    • ✤ Five, he has no idea what else could be out there. For example, if British doctrine was anything like his own, then even at this moment, dozens of British destroyers might be swarming towards him, about to envelop his forces in a maelstrom of torpedoes, and the first thing he’d know about it is when things start exploding! (Well, even more than they already are now.)10

Etymology

🖼️ ➺

The word was originally the name of a giant whirlpool off Norway in the Arctic Ocean which was said to destroy all ships that came close to it, likely the actual tidal pool system of Moskstraumen in Lofoten.

It is borrowed from early modern Dutch maelstrom (“whirlpool”) (obsolete) (modern Dutch maalstroom), from malen (“to whirl around; to grind”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ﹡melh₂- (“to crush, grind”)) + stroom (“stream; river; current or flow of water or other liquid”) (ultimately from Proto-Indo-European ﹡srew- (“to flow, stream”)),11 and was popularized by Edgar Allen Poe ’s short story A Descent into the Maelström (1841).

Pronunciation

  • (Received Pronunciation) IPA: /ˈmeɪl.stɹəm/, /ˈmeɪlˌstɹɒm/
  • (General American) IPA: /ˈmeɪl.stɹəm/, /ˈmæl.stɹəm/, /ˈmeɪlˌstɹɑm/, /ˈmeɪlˌstɹɔm/
  • Audio (General American): 🔊
  • Hyphenation: mael‧strom

Printed 2026-09-15.

(echo:: @ ⌗)

Footnotes

  1. 1905, James Edward Preston Muddock, “A Petrified Forest”, in The Sunless City […], London: F. V. White & Co., →OCLC: ↩

  2. 1914 November 14, Arthur Train, [Robert Williams Wood], “The Man Who Rocked the Earth”, in The Saturday Evening Post, volume 187, number 20, Philadelphia, Pa.; London: Curtis Publishing Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, chapter VI, page 65, column 2: ↩

  3. 2001 April 26, Eoin Colfer, “Troll”, in Artemis Fowl, New York, N.Y.; Toronto, Ont.: Scholastic, published September 2001, →ISBN, page 212: ↩

  4. 1831, Thomas Carlyle, “Characteristics”, in Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. […], London: Chapman and Hall, […], →OCLC, 1st book, page 22: ↩

  5. 1922, Harry Leon Wilson, “‘Five Reels—500 Laughs’”, in Merton of the Movies, Garden City, N.Y.; Toronto, Ont.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC, page 310: ↩

  6. 2012, Andrew Martin, Underground Overground: A Passenger’s History of the Tube, London: Profile Books, →ISBN, page 80: ↩

  7. 2018 December 20, Don Sweeney, “Aquarium apologizes for ‘offensive’ Twitter post praising Abby the ‘thicc’ otter”, in The Sacramento Bee ‎, archived from the original on 27 September 2020: ↩

  8. 2019 September 18, Drachinifel, 21:07 from the start, in Battle of Tsushima - When the 2nd Pacific Squadron thought it couldn’t get any worse… ‎, archived from the original on 4 December 2022: ↩

  9. 2019 May 5, Danette Chavez, “Campaigns are Waged On and Off the Game Of Thrones Battlefield (Newbies)”, in The A.V. Club ‎, archived from the original on 28 January 2021: ↩

  10. 2020 August 5, Drachinifel, 19:53 from the start, in The Battle of Jutland - Clash of the Titans - Part 2 (Jellicoe vs Scheer) ‎, archived from the original on 12 September 2022: ↩

  11. “maelstrom, n.”, in OED Online ⁠, Oxford: Oxford University Press, December 2020; “maelstrom, n.”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022. ↩

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