Word Finder - convulsion

definition

An intense, paroxysmal, involuntary muscular contraction.

definition

An uncontrolled fit, as of laughter; a paroxysm.

definition

Violent turmoil.

example

Earthquakes and convulsions of nature shake Earth on a regular basis.

Any noise, a draught of air or a touch may cause a convulsion.

Then low-level electric current is passed through the brain to cause a brief convulsion.

The great convulsion of the Revolution was drawing to a close, and everything was in an unsettled condition.

Ordinary doses have no effect upon the temperature but in overdose the temperature rises during a convulsion.

If the king or queen could either have had the political genius of Frederick the Great, or could have had the good fortune to find a minister with that genius, and the good sense and good faith to trust and stand by him against mobs of aristocrats and mobs of democrats; if the army had been sound and the states-general had been convoked at Bourges or Tours instead of at Paris, then the type of French monarchy and French society might have been modernized without convulsion.

Since this great convulsion, which emptied the crater, Vesuvius is never again relapsed into a condition of total quiescence.

The refusal of the king of Sweden to marry into her family unless the bride would become a Lutheran is said to have thrown her into a convulsion of rage which hastened her death.

These and other less well marked changes, say some critics, are signs of a racial convulsion not long after 2000 B.C. An old race was conquered by a new, even if, in matters of civilization, the former capta victorem cepit.

The war, which, probably because of financial trouble, the Spartans had neglected to pursue when Athens was thus in the throes of political convulsion, was now resumed.

After a great political convulsion such as the Norman conquest, and the wholesale confiscation of landed estates which followed it, it was William's interest to make sure that the rights of the crown, which he claimed to have inherited, had not suffered in the process.

He prophesied in London as Isaiah prophesied to the little towns of Palestine and Syria, "often with dark foreboding, but seeing through all unrest and convulsion the working out of a sure divine purpose."

William Gilpin, who is so admirable in all that relates to landscapes, and usually so correct, standing at the head of Loch Fyne, in Scotland, which he describes as "a bay of salt water, sixty or seventy fathoms deep, four miles in breadth," and about fifty miles long, surrounded by mountains, observes, "If we could have seen it immediately after the diluvian crash, or whatever convulsion of nature occasioned it, before the waters gushed in, what a horrid chasm must it have appeared!

In Oudh, after the convulsion of the Mutiny, all rights in land were confiscated at a stroke, and the new system adopted was in the nature of a treaty between the state and the talukdars, or great landlords.