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say it: MELT-down
meltdown is a noun meaning "severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor resulting in the core melting and radiation escaping". It is pronounced /ˈmɛltˌdaʊn/ — MELT-down. It carries 2 recorded senses.
severe overheating of the core of a nuclear reactor resulting in the core melting and radiation escaping
a disaster comparable to a nuclear meltdown
“there is little likelihood of a meltdown comparable to the American banking collapse in March 1933”
Forms marked · are formed by the regular rule rather than recorded in the source data. English keeps a few hundred irregulars and the rest follow the pattern, so the rule is right far more often than not — but it is a rule, and the mark says so.
Definitions, synonyms and semantic relations for meltdown come from Princeton University’s WordNet. The pronunciation comes from the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Commonness is measured against a corpus of everyday English. Full sources and licences.