explode

The blast used as a deliberate act: someone does the exploding, and the thing is destroyed. In the intransitive partner, bursting apart, the bomb itself explodes. Here the bomb is only the means, as in exploding a car by means of a car bomb. Blow up covers both uses. Oddly, the physical meaning is not where the word began. It started in the theater, as the 'disprove' meaning explains.

Here the thing destroyed is often not physical: a myth, a reputation, years of careful work. To explode the myth stands very close to the archaic 'disprove' meaning, and the two are hard to pull apart. The difference is emphasis. This use stresses how violently or abruptly something collapses, not whether anyone has proved it false.

Often a speech verb that introduces the outburst itself: "Nonsense!" Jack exploded at me, in Albert R. Carman's "My Bridal Trip" (1902). It takes at for the person on the receiving end. The feeling need not be anger. Thackeray's Dobbin, in Vanity Fair, explodes "with shrieks of yelling laughter." Blow up is the close synonym.

The verb for numbers that take off: populations explode, markets explode. Suddenness is relative here. A market can explode "over the last couple of decades," so the verb reports how dramatic a rise is rather than how quickly it happened. It sits comfortably in the present perfect, the market has exploded, when the growth is still being felt.

The verb of dramatic arrivals, almost always followed by into or onto: explode onto the scene, into the mainstream, into the lexicon. The preposition names the space being entered, such as a field, a vocabulary or public attention. The subject is usually something new: image generators, a cluster of words, a newcomer. Burst is the close synonym.

A mathematician's word for what happens near a singularity: f(x) = 1/x explodes around x = 0, its value growing past any bound as x closes in. The verb describes behavior near a point, not over time, so nothing needs to be sudden. That separates it from the everyday 'surge' meaning. The quantity does not merely jump; it never settles at any finite limit.

PHP's name for cutting a string at its delimiters: a date written with separators is exploded into an array of parts, and what comes back is spoken of as exploded data. The separators themselves are discarded. Split and unstring are the general synonyms, and outside PHP code split is the word most readers will recognize.

Compression has its own pair of words. PKZIP's Implode method packs data, and to explode is to unpack it. Steve Tibbett's 1992 comp.compression post asks for code that will "implode data using the PKZIP method… and explode it." Despite sharing a field, this has nothing to do with splitting text strings. Here the word is tied to one specific compression scheme.