crash

1. a sudden descent of an aircraft as a result of which it hits land or water

2. the sudden collapse of a business, stock exchange, etc., esp one causing further financial failure

crash

a coarse cotton or linen cloth used for towelling, curtains, etc.

Collins Discovery Encyclopedia, 1st edition © HarperCollins Publishers 2005

crash

[krash]

(computer science)

A breakdown, hardware failure, or software problem that renders a computer system inoperative.

abend

(textiles)

A coarse, rugged fabric woven from linen, cotton, or a combination of both.

crash

(1)

A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system, especially of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a "head crash", whereas the term "system crash" usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.

crash

(2)

To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" "Something crashed the OS!" See down. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing SPACEWAR crashed the system."

This article is provided by FOLDOC - Free Online Dictionary of Computing (foldoc.org)

crash

(1) An abnormal termination of a software program. See abend.

(2) A hard disk failure. See head crash.

Copyright © 1981-2025 by The Computer Language Company Inc. All Rights reserved. THIS DEFINITION IS FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. All other reproduction is strictly prohibited without permission from the publisher.

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