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crisis

nouncommon in dialogue

  • Canada//ˈkɹaɪsɪs//
  • Australia//ˈkɹɑesɪs//
  • New Zealand//ˈkɹaɪsəs//
  • New Zealand/[ˈkɹɑe̯səs]/

A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.

noun

  1. 1

    A crucial or decisive point or situation; a turning point.

  2. 2

    An unstable situation, in political, social, economic or military affairs, especially one involving an impending abrupt change.

    The financial crisis could have been avoided and was the result of poor decision making both in Washington and at top financial firms that fostered a culture of excessive risk taking, according to a draft report written by Democrats on a panel that investigated the meltdown and obtained by Reuters.

  3. 3

    A sudden change in the course of a disease, usually at which point the patient is expected to either recover or die.

  4. 4

    A traumatic or stressful change in a person's life.

    I'm having a major crisis trying to wallpaper the living room.

  5. 5

    A point in a drama at which a conflict reaches a peak before being resolved.

  6. 6

    Orgasm

    Connie found it impossible to come to her crisis before he had really finished his.

    The orgasm started slow, a few little twitches and vibrations, but as if he sensed her crisis, he increased both the speed of his thrusting fingers and the suction of his mouth on her sex.

    He grunted as his thrusts increased, grew harder, and just as her crisis ended, he withdrew with a curse.

Etymology

From Latin crisis, from Ancient Greek κρίσις (krísis, “a separating, power of distinguishing, decision, choice, election, judgment, dispute”), from κρίνω (krínō, “pick out, choose, decide, judge”).

Forms

plural
crises
The neighbouring pagesAlphabetical order follows the rules of the language, not byte values: an accent decides only between two otherwise identical words, and Spanish files Ñ as a letter of its own.

Lexical content from Wiktionary, under CC BY-SA 4.0 · Source entry · Data version 2026-08-23

Rank among the words of the OpenSubtitles 2018 corpus — film and television subtitles, so spoken rather than written usage (CC BY-SA 3.0).