Synonyms:
turbulence, upheaval, Sturm_und_Drang
Meaning: a state of violent disturbance and disorder (as in politics or social conditions generally); "the industrial revolution was a period of great turbulence"
Usage examples
"You may count upon me, my lord, provided you want to make a complete upheaval of the city."
To-night John Perkins encountered a tremendous upheaval of the commonplace when he reached his door.
More magnanimous than Nero, he would thus give musical warning of the forthcoming municipal upheaval that Quicksand was scheduled to endure.
We knew that the ice was in awful upheaval around us; we heard, as our eyelids sweetly closed, the slow booming of distant guns, and brittle cracklings of artillery.
"Every stratum was aquiver with apprehension," he declared; "and there was never any telling when the next grand upheaval would rock the whole structure to its foundations."
Thanks to the work of polyps, a slow but steady upheaval will someday connect these islands to each other. Later on, this new island will be fused to its neighboring island groups, and a fifth continent will stretch from New Zealand and New Caledonia as far as the Marquesas Islands.
Now, too, I noticed that, but for these stones, all roughness had disappeared, not a trace of the upheaval going on a little further south being here, for the ice lay positively as smooth as a table before me. It is my belief that this stretch of smooth ice has never, never felt one shock, or stir, or throe, and reaches right down to the bottom of the deep.