implode

English

Etymology

Back-formation from implosion.

Pronunciation

• Audio (Southern England):

  (file)

Verb

implode (third-person singular simple present implodes, present participle imploding, simple past and past participle imploded)

1. (intransitive) To collapse or burst inward violently.

   Antonym: explode

   The submarine imploded as it sank below its crush depth.

   1. (politics, by extension) To suddenly lose support in all areas of a campaign simultaneously.

      Ragusa's campaign imploded after she confused coal mining with oil drilling during a speech.

2. (transitive) To cause to collapse or burst inward violently.
3. (computing, programming, PHP) The opposite of explode, array to string conversion.
4. (transitive, computing) To compress (data) with a particular algorithm.

   Antonym: explode

   • 1992, Steve Tibbett, “PKZIP Implode compression/decompression.”, in comp.compression (Usenet):

     I'm looking for some code that will implode data using the PKZIP method.. and explode it. PKWare sells an object that you can link with that does the job, and we have licensed this, but we are now writing 32 bit code for MS-DOS and the PKWare stuff won't work […]

Derived terms

• imploder

Translations

to collapse or burst inward violently

Finnish: luhistua (fi), romahtaa (fi) French: imploser (fr) German: implodieren (de) Ido: implozar (io) Italian: implodere (it) Norwegian: implodere, kollapse Polish: implodować Portuguese: implodir (pt) Russian: взрываться (вовнутрь) (vzryvatʹsja (vovnutrʹ)) Spanish: implosionar (es) Swedish: implodera (sv) Turkish: yıkılmak (tr)

Italian

Verb

implode

1. third-person singular present indicative of implodere

Portuguese

Verb

implode

1. inflection of implodir:
   1. third-person singular present indicative
   2. second-person singular imperative