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volcano

nounverbcommon in dialogue

  • United Kingdom//vɒlˈkeɪ.nəʊ//
  • United Kingdom//vɒlˈkɑː.nəʊ//
  • United Kingdom//vɔlˈkɛjnəw//
  • United States//vɑlˈkeɪ.noʊ//
  • United States//vɔlˈkeɪ.noʊ//

A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically erupting forth lava and volcanic gases onto the surface.

noun

  1. 1

    A vent or fissure on the surface of a planet (usually in a mountainous form) with a magma chamber attached to the mantle of a planet or moon, periodically erupting forth lava and volcanic gases onto the surface.

    Iceland's volcanoes are among the most active on Earth.

  2. 2

    A kind of firework producing an upward plume of sparks.

Etymology

From Italian vulcano, from Vulcano (“a small volcanic island in the Tyrrhenian Sea”), from Latin Vulcānus (“Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and metalworking”). Doublet of bolcane and Vulcan.

verb

  1. 1

    to erupt; to burst forth

    She shrank back, the words volcanoed, words that stabbed again, and yet again

    Startled, you look up at the horizon just in time to see a gigantic plume of ash and dust volcanoing up into the sky and spreading out to form a gigantic cloud that will persist for days, weeks, perhaps years.

Forms

plural
volcanoes, volcanos
past tense
volcanoed
past participle
volcanoed
present participle
volcanoing
third person singular
volcanos, volcanoes
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).