from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
- n. A violent or turbulent situation: caught in the maelstrom of war.
- n. A whirlpool of extraordinary size or violence.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. A large and violent whirlpool.
- n. Any violent or turbulent situation.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English
- n. A celebrated whirlpool on the coast of Norway.
- n. An uncontrollable agitated or confusedly disordered state or situation.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A celebrated whirlpool or violent current in the Arctic ocean, near the western coast of Norway, between the islands Moskenäsö and Mosken, formerly supposed to suck in and destroy everything that approached it at any time, but now known not to be dangerous except under certain conditions.
- n. Hence Any resistless movement; any influence or passion which makes victims of all who come within its power: as, the maelstrom of fashion or of speculation; the maelstrom of dissipation or of crime.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. a powerful circular current of water (usually the result of conflicting tides)
What would it be like to view that maelstrom from a nearby system?
Baldwin honestly tries to describe the result, but expressive insight into that emotional maelstrom is not a power within his possession and is not really on offer here.
Catapulting Jackson into the eye of the maelstrom was his explosively creative pairing with another multi-faceted industry legend, Quincy Jones.
What one historian has called a maelstrom of retaliation and counter-retaliation built to a howling crescendo.
As a matter of fact the maelstrom is a whirlpool lying where Poe places it, and it has been made noted by many other accounts than this of Poe, most of which are exaggerated, but none of them so brilliant in execution as
Every time we pass through the Atlantic Avenue maelstrom, which is twelve times a week, we see, as plain as print, the beginning of two magazine tales.
My other chip from the maelstrom was a lad half grown.
"You're gonna bring this jury into what is already fairly described as a maelstrom of media activity, and it's not going to get any better," he says.
And smack dab in the middle of the maelstrom is the current governor, Milorad "Rod" R. Blagojevich, proud Serbian-American.
Bacigalupi also prognosticates a likely future of media giants, not only technically (where hit rates are visually tracked in a "maelstrom" of living blobs of color), but also at a meta-level, where the information is a living, breathing thing that is tailored to the lowest common denominator of interest.