English edit

Etymology edit

apocalyptic +‎ -ally

Pronunciation edit

  • (UK) IPA(key): /əˈpɒ.kə.lɪp.tɪkəli/
  • Hyphenation: a‧poc‧a‧lyp‧tic‧ally

Adverb edit

apocalyptically (not comparable)

  1. In an apocalyptic manner.
  2. In a manner portending future disaster, devastation, and doom.
    • 1834, William Rose Benet, The Reader's Encyclopedia Second Edition[1], page 1082:
      Aerial warfare and the atomic bomb, which he “invented” in The War in the Air (1908) and The World Set Free (1914), have proved as apocalyptically destructive as he prophesied.
    • 1893, Henry James, Essays in London and Elsewhere[2], Harper & Brothers, page 185:
      I hope I appear not to speak too apocalyptically in saying that the problem is still there to minister to our interest and perhaps even a little to our anxiety.
    • 1929, American Literature: A Journal of Literary History, Criticism and Bibliography[3], Duke University Press, page 773:
      Juxtaposing a secular vision of an earth apocalyptically destroyed through the activities of a Euro-American culture devoted to exploiting resources in every possible way with an equally apocalyptic, sacred vision of the age of the coming of the fifth world in which the culture of destruction will pass away, Silko depicts a world in which apocalypse saturates the everyday, undoing the realism of the nuclear complex by positioning it in a different timeline that has a different past, a different future, and a different present to anything that the nuclear state might think to contain in even its most totalizing attempts to model the world.
    • 1931, The American Mercury 1931-05: Volume 23, Issue 89[4], Sunway Media, page 104:
      The Hobo of the Ideal disappeared from my life as apocalyptically as he had come. He stood with me in front of the window of the Press, pointed to a bulletin saying that the Chicago anarchists had been hanged, and whispered to me, “The time has come!”
    • 1986, Current Biography Yearbook[5], H. W. Wilson Company, page 481:
      The protagonist of Shame is a retarded, completely innocent girl who becomes a universal emotional surrogate, absorbing the shame for the acts of the power-hungry characters around her and turning into a monstrous and apocalyptically destructive force.

Translations edit