meltdown
/ˈmeltdaʊn/noun
1
- a disastrous collapse and breakdown灾难性崩溃（或瓦解）：
the global financial system suffered a major meltdown.
全球金融体系遭遇严重崩溃。
2
- an accident in a nuclear reactor in which the fuel overheats and melts the reactor core or shielding熔毁（指核燃料过热熔化反应堆活性区或外罩）。
WORD TRENDS
A meltdown was originally a catastrophic accident in a nuclear reactor, but this literal meaning has been swamped by the figurative sense of 'a disastrous collapse or breakdown'. This is a fairly recent coinage, first recorded in 1983, with the 'Black Monday' stock market crash of October 1987 labelled a market meltdown. The Oxford English Corpus shows a fairly steady use throughout the last decade, but in 2007 there was a massive leap in the number of examples. This reflects the beginning of the recession, with financial, economic, global, and mortgage becoming the word's most common collocates: the global financial meltdown sent oil prices plummeting today.