avalanche

1. (intransitive) To descend like an avalanche.Examples: "Whenever the stage stopped to change horses, we would wake up, and try to recollect where we were—[…] We began to get into country, now, threaded here and there with little streams. These had high, steep banks on each side, and every time we flew down one bank and scrambled up the other, our party inside got mixed somewhat. First we would all be down in a pile at the forward end of the stage, nearly in a sitting posture, and in a second we would shoot to the other end, and stand on our heads. […] ¶ Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too; and every time it came it damaged somebody."; "Soon the sun’s warmth makes them shed crystal shells Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust—"; "As it happened, I had progressed only some few feet out onto the snow when a clean-cut section stripped off the surface and avalanched."intransitive

2. (transitive) To come down upon; to overwhelm.Examples: "The shelf broke and the boxes avalanched the workers."; "The applications were doubtless snowed under in the maze of official correspondence which avalanched the new government."transitive

3. (transitive) To propel downward like an avalanche.Examples: "When our artist and I were dropped down our first coal-mine, we felt a leetle bit anxious. It was something new. But we have been avalanched down the incline from Peak Forest, and boomeranged round the sudden curve at Rowsley, and have run the gauntlet at Penistone and King’s Cross without ever taking the precaution to say “God help us.”"; "The scuppers could not carry off the burden of water on the schooner’s deck. She rolled it out and took it in over one rail and the other; and at times, nose thrown skyward, sitting down on her heel, she avalanched it aft."; "Then another misfortune avalanched itself upon me, before even I had fully taken in the extent of the first."transitive