cascade

cascade

See also: Cascade and cascadé

English

WOTD – 6 September 2007

Etymology

From French cascade, from Italian cascata, from cascare (“to fall”), from Vulgar Latin *casicāre, from casus, verbal noun of cadō, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ḱh₂d- (“to fall”).

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kæsˈkeɪd/

• Audio (AU)

  (file)

• Rhymes: -eɪd

Noun

cascade (plural cascades)

1. A waterfall or series of small waterfalls.
   • 1785, William Cowper, The Garden

     Now murm'ring soft, now roaring in cascade.

   • 1839, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, The Spirit of Poetry

     The silver brook […] pours the white cascade.

2. (figuratively) A stream or sequence of a thing or things occurring as if falling like a cascade.
   • 2001, Richard Restak, The Secret Life of the Brain, Joseph Henry Press

     The rise in serotonin levels sets off a cascade of chemical events

   • 2019 October, “Funding for 20tph East London Line service”, in Modern Railways, page 18:

     Provision was made for this cascade of units when TfL [Transport for London] exercised an option in its order for Class 710s from Bombardier for an extra 6x5-car units and 3x4-car units: these would be used on the North London line and release '378s' for the East London line.

3. A series of electrical (or other types of) components, the output of any one being connected to the input of the next; See also daisy chain
4. (juggling) A pattern typically performed with an odd number of props, where each prop is caught by the opposite hand.
5. (Internet) A sequence of absurd short messages posted to a newsgroup by different authors, each one responding to the most recent message and quoting the entire sequence to that point (with ever-increasing indentation).
   • 1993, "e.j.barker", Disassociation (on Internet newsgroup alt.slack)

     Don't you hate cascades? I hate cascades!

   • 1999, "Anonymous", CYBERLIAR SCAVENGER HUNT 1999 (on Internet newsgroup alt.test)

     Spark a usenet cascade of no less than 300 replies.

   • 2004, "swt", ARRR! (on Internet newsgroup alt.religion.kibology)

     Anyway. I didn't mean to say that everyone who posts URLs is bad and wrong and should lose their breathing privileges. Just that I was getting weary of look-at-this-link posts, sort of like some people get sick of cascades.

6. A hairpiece for women consisting of curled locks or a bun attached to a firm base, used to create the illusion of fuller hair.
   • 1998, Teresa Nelson, Creative Wedding Decorations You Can Make, →ISBN, page 10:

     A cascade can be added to one or both sides of the band to work well with longer hair.

7. (chemistry) A series of reactions in which the product of one becomes a reactant in the next

Derived terms

• cascadable
• Cascade County
• cascade everlasting
• cascade method
• cascade particle
• path cascade
• quantum cascade laser
• (ecology): trophic cascade
• (juggling): reverse cascade, French cascade

Translations

waterfall

Ainu: ソ (so) Armenian: կասկադ (hy) (kaskad) Bulgarian: водопа́д m (vodopád) Chinese: Mandarin: 瀑布 (zh) Danish: vandfald (da) n Dutch: waterval (nl) Faroese: fossur (fo) m Finnish: köngäs (fi), kaskadi, vesiputous (fi) French: cascade (fr) f, chute d'eau (fr) f German: Wasserfall (de) m, Kaskade (de) f Greek: καταρράκτης (el) m (katarráktis) Hungarian: vízesés (hu) Kannada: ಅಬ್ಬಿ (kn) (abbi) Khmer: ល្បាក់ទឹក (lbak tuek) Malayalam: വെള്ളച്ചാട്ടം (veḷḷaccāṭṭaṃ) Maori: hūkere Polish: kaskada (pl) f Portuguese: cascata (pt) f, cachoeira (pt) f, salto (pt) m, queda d'água f Romanian: cascadă (ro) f Russian: водопа́д (ru) m (vodopád) Scottish Gaelic: eas (gd) m Serbo-Croatian: Cyrillic: водопад m, слап m, каскада f Roman: vodopad (sh) m, slap (sh) m, kaskada (sh) f Spanish: cascada (es) f Tamil: விழுதொடர் (viḻutoṭar)

sequence of events

Danish: kaskade (da) c Finnish: tapahtumasarja German: Kaskade (de) f Malayalam: സംഭവപരമ്പര (sambhavaparampara) Polish: kaskada (pl) f Portuguese: cascata (pt) f Russian: каска́д (ru) m (kaskád) Serbo-Croatian: Cyrillic: каскада f Roman: kaskada (sh) f Swedish: kaskad (sv) c

series of electric components

Bulgarian: каскада (kaskada) Finnish: sarja (fi) Polish: kaskada (pl) f Romanian: cascadă (ro) f, circuit-cascadă n

Verb

cascade (third-person singular simple present cascades, present participle cascading, simple past and past participle cascaded)

1. (intransitive) To fall as a waterfall or series of small waterfalls.
   • 2020 August 26, “Network News: Major flood damage severs key Edinburgh-Glasgow rail artery”, in Rail, page 21:

     Services between Glasgow Queen Street and Edinburgh Waverley via Falkirk High are currently suspended, following a 30-metre breach of the Union Canal that occurred on August 12 after torrential rain and thunderstorms. The thousands of gallons of water that cascaded onto the railway line below washed away track, ballast and overhead line equipment, and undermined embankments along a 300-metre section of Scotland's busiest rail link.

2. (transitive) To arrange in a stepped series like a waterfall.
   • 2001, Greg M Perry, Sams teach yourself Microsoft Windows XP in 24 hours:

     No matter how you tile or cascade the windows, each window's Minimize, Maximize, and Restore buttons work as usual.

3. (intransitive) To occur as a causal sequence.
   • 2003, Adam Freeman, Allen Jones, Programming .NET Security

     Child folders inherit the configuration of their parent folder, meaning that configuration settings cascade down through an application's virtual folder hierarchy.

   • 2019 October, Rhodri Clark, “TfW seeks PRM derogation for Class 37 sets”, in Modern Railways, page 87:

     Relief arrived at Cardiff Canton depot on 1 September in the shape of the first of 12 Class 170 units cascaded from Greater Anglia.

4. (archaic, slang) To vomit.

Part or all of this entry has been imported from the 1913 edition of Webster’s Dictionary, which is now free of copyright and hence in the public domain. The imported definitions may be significantly out of date, and any more recent senses may be completely missing.
(See the entry for cascade in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913)

Translations

To fall as a waterfall or series of small waterfalls

German: herabstürzen (de) Portuguese: cascatear

To arrange in a stepped series like a waterfall

German: hintereinanderschalten Polish: kaskadować Portuguese: cascatear

To occur as a causal sequence

To vomit

Anagrams

• saccade

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Dutch

Etymology

Borrowing from French cascade, from Italian cascata.

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /ˌkɑsˈkaː.də/

• Audio

  (file)

• Hyphenation: cas‧ca‧de
• Rhymes: -aːdə

Noun

cascade f (plural cascades or cascaden)

1. cascade (waterfall or series of small waterfalls)

Descendants

• → Indonesian: kaskade

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French

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /kas.kad/

• Audio

  (file)

Etymology 1

From Italian cascata, from cascare (“to fall”).

Noun

cascade f (plural cascades)

1. cascade (waterfall)

   Synonym: chute d'eau

2. cascade (series of event)
3. (juggling) cascade
4. a stunt performed for cinematic imitation or entertainment

Derived terms

• cascader

Descendants

• → Danish: kaskade
• → Dutch: cascade
• → German: Kaskade
• → Romanian: cascadă
• → Swedish: kaskad

Verb

cascade

1. inflection of cascader:
   1. first/third-person singular present indicative/subjunctive
   2. second-person singular imperative

Further reading

• “cascade”, in Trésor de la langue française informatisé [Digitized Treasury of the French Language], 2012.

Anagrams

• accédas, saccade, saccadé

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Romanian

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): [kaˈskade]

Noun

cascade f

1. inflection of cascadă:
   1. indefinite plural
   2. indefinite genitive/dative singular