crashes

1. 1
   verb

   Third-person singular simple present of crash.

   The drone crashes whenever its battery runs too low.

   Whenever the network overloads, the main server crashes within seconds.

   Note

   One spelling carries both the intransitive and the transitive verb. A drone crashes on its own, but a driver crashes a car, and a manager crashes a schedule by putting more resources behind it. In slang it stands for gatecrash, as in he crashes every party. With I, you, we or they, the form drops back to plain crash.

2. 2
   noun

   Plural of crash.

   The week saw several plane crashes reported across three continents.

   Sudden crashes of thunder shook the windows throughout the night.

   Note

   The -es plural that a final -sh calls for, and it serves every countable kind of crash: crashes of thunder or cymbals, road and air crashes, software crashes, market crashes, even drug comedowns in informal speech. The odd one is the collective sense, where a crash is a group of rhinoceroses, so two crashes of rhinoceroses means two herds. The same spelling also serves the present-tense verb. A number or determiner in front marks the noun.

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