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sudden

SUD-uhn/ˈsʌdn̩/

Formssuddener, suddenest

5 meanings of sudden

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  1. 1
    adjective
    Happening quickly and with little or no warning or expectation.

    The storm's sudden arrival caught the hikers far from shelter.

    Her decision to leave was sudden and left everyone stunned.

    Similarunexpected, abrupt, unforeseen, swift

    Oppositegradual, expected, slow

    Note

    Behind the everyday meaning lies a stealthy one. Latin subitus meant "that which has come stealthily" and was first the past participle of subire, a verb of coming or going. The word reached English through Old French sodain and Middle English sodeyn. The Book of Common Prayer of 1552 asks deliverance "from ſodayn death," and the word still compares the native way: suddener, suddenest.

  2. 2
    adverbliterary
    Quickly and without warning; all at once.

    The wind dropped sudden, and the sails hung limp.

    He woke sudden in the dark, heart pounding.

    Similarabruptly

    Oppositegradually, slowly

    Note

    A flat adverb, identical in form to the adjective and kept now for verse. Milton writes of "herbs of every leaf that sudden flowered" in Paradise Lost. It compares with more and most (more sudden), not with -er. In ordinary prose, suddenly is the safe choice. The bare form reads as deliberate poetic compression.

  3. 3
    adjectiveobsolete
    Put together or pressed into use in haste; quick and rapid.

    The soldiers raised a sudden rampart of earth before nightfall.

    Never was such a sudden scholar made.
    c. 1599, William Shakespeare, Henry V
    Note

    Here the speed belongs to the making, not the arrival. In Shakespeare's Henry V, a "sudden scholar" is one made overnight. Milton's "sudden eye" in Eikonoklastes is a hasty glance that judges by surfaces, and Tennyson still reaches for "a sudden hand" in In Memoriam (1850). The sense is obsolete, so a modern reader meeting it should understand "hastily made" or "quick," not "unexpected."

Less common meanings

  1. 4
    adjectiveobsolete
    Hasty in temper or action; rash, violent, and impulsive.

    The young lord was sudden and fierce, striking before he thought.

    I have no joy of this contract to-night: / It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
    c. 1591, William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet
    Note

    A word for temperament and judgment, now obsolete. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Juliet uses it of the night's vows: "too rash, too unadvised, too sudden." The company it keeps there shows its force: reckless, ill-considered, precipitate. Unlike the everyday "unexpected" meaning, it passes a verdict. Something sudden in this sense was done too fast to be wise.

  2. 5
    nounobsolete
    An event that comes without warning; a surprise.

    His return after ten years was a sudden none had foreseen.

    The ambush, a cruel sudden, scattered the merchants on the road.

    Note

    Obsolete as a free-standing noun, though it once took a plural, suddens. It survives fossilized in the adverbial phrases on a sudden and of a sudden, both meaning "suddenly." That is where a modern reader is most likely to meet it. Outside those phrases, a sudden used as a countable noun will read as deliberately archaic.

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Origin

"Sudden" came through Middle English "sodeyn" and Anglo-Norman "sodein" from Old French "sodain" (immediate, sudden), from Vulgar Latin *subitānus and Latin subitāneus (sudden), from subitus (sudden, literally "that which has come stealthily"), the past participle of subīre ("to come or go stealthily"), from sub (under) plus īre (go). It displaced the native Old English fǣrlīċ.