spontaneous combustion

1. 1.

   ignition of a substance (as oily rags) resulting from an internal oxidation process

   Broaderignition

Questions about spontaneous combustion

What does spontaneous combustion mean?

spontaneous combustion means "ignition of a substance (as oily rags) resulting from an internal oxidation process".

Is spontaneous combustion a common word?

spontaneous combustion is banded "Rare" — specialist or archaic — most readers will not have met it. The band comes from how often the word appears in a large corpus of everyday English, not from an editor's impression.