blast

Here the word names the charge, not the bang: the explosive packed and placed before it goes off. Charles Tomlinson's Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts (1852–1854) notes that "large blasts are often used," meaning large charges. To tell it from the explosion itself, ask whether the thing can still be loaded, lowered or misfired. If it can, it is the charge.

A marketer's word for sending to everyone at once. It usually follows the channel it travels by: an e-mail blast, a fax blast. The image is of one message fired at the whole list rather than addressed to anyone in particular. Because the noun is countable, a campaign can send several blasts over its run.

Ruin as if sent from heaven. In Addison's Cato (1713), the speaker longs for a hidden thunder "to blast the man who owes his greatness to his country's ruin." The grand literary note carries into Rider Haggard's She, where a woman is "blasted into death" by a mysterious force. Today it more often falls on careers and hopes.

Science fiction's verb for firing a beam: Chewbacca blasted the Stormtroopers with his laser rifle. The convention separates energy weapons from guns that fire projectiles. A story can therefore signal its technology through the verb alone. Shoot covers bullets; blast suggests rays.

The verb has its own Old English root, blǣstan, "to blow." Shakespeare uses it in that loud, blowing sense in Antony and Cleopatra: "Trumpeters, / With brazen din blast you the city's ear." The object is the hearer, or the ear itself, struck by sound. The trumpeters do not merely play; they assault the listener.

African-American Vernacular English gives blast a slang life as gunfire, and the verb works in two constructions. With an object it names a target (decided to blast him). Without one it describes shooting in general, as in showed up blasting. Unlike the energy-weapon sense, it refers to ordinary guns. As slang, it belongs to speech and dialogue rather than neutral reporting.

Soccer reporting uses it for a shot struck with power, sometimes too much. In the BBC's 2010 report of Chelsea 1 - 0 Bolton, Ricketts "blasted over when a calmer finish could have been rewarded." The verb takes the ball as its object, or a direction such as over for a miss. The implied contrast is with a calm, placed finish.

A mild oath, chiefly British and only faintly blasphemous, that grows out of cursing someone or something. Its fuller form is blast it! The writer Christian Wolmar used it in 2025: hunting for a membership card to tear up, he found "Blast, it's plastic." It fits small, everyday frustrations and works alone or at the head of a sentence.

Ironmasters measured their output by it. Many tons of iron "melted at a blast" means melted in a single run of the furnace. Without an article, the word names the air supply itself. H.R. Schubert's History of the British Iron and Steel Industry (1957) describes blast produced by bellows worked in relays by four "blowers." Both uses grow from the forced stream from a bellows.

A studio fault, not a sound anyone wants: the burst of noise a microphone produces on its own. In 1969, The Realist counted "microphone blast" among the common faults of early microphones, alongside background noise. It often goes without an article, as a quality of the signal. The compound microphone blast is the clearest way to name it.

The verb behind the noxious-wind blight, and weather is still a natural subject: a cold wind blasted the rose plants. It is transitive, with something doing the blasting to the plant. An intransitive partner exists for the plant that is itself blasted or withered.

The wind as an agent of harm. This sense rests on the idea of a foul air that strikes crops and flocks. The King James Bible of 1611 makes the wind God's own: "by the blast of God they perish, and by the breath of his nostrils are they consumed." Shakespeare speaks of "fell destruction's blast." The idea lives on in the verb for blighting.

A separate word that only looks like the others. It comes from Greek blastós, "germ or sprout," not from the Old English for blowing. Cytologists use it for a cell still at its starting stage. It most often appears inside compounds such as lymphoblast and myeloblast. On its own it serves as shorthand, so a count of blasts is a count of immature cells.

Lab shorthand built from an acronym, BLAST, the Basic Local Alignment Search Tool, with no link to explosions. Biologists blast a sequence against a database. The verb is informal lab talk. Results depend on the molecule. Bommarius and Riebel-Bommarius (2004) note that a reliable nucleotide hit needs about 70% homology over the whole sequence, against 25% for proteins.

Gym slang that comes in a pair: blast and cruise. The blast is the stretch at full dosage of performance-enhancing drugs. The cruise is the lower-dose stretch set against it, and the two alternate. The vocabulary belongs to bodybuilding circles, so outside them it needs explaining. The same phrase works with the verb.

The action behind the blast-and-cruise cycle: lifters blast for a stretch, then cruise. The verb is measured in time, in weeks or seasons, rather than in doses. Cruise is its natural opposite. Like the noun, it is gym slang and needs explaining to anyone outside bodybuilding.