craze
/kreɪz
/noun
An enthusiasm for a particular activity or object which appears suddenly and achieves widespread but short-lived popularity: the new craze for step aerobics...
- Thereafter England also enthusiastically embraced the craze for Egyptian antiquities.
- The salon organizers have made prints a special highlight of this year's event, hoping to start a craze for print collecting in China.
- The craze for watching football matches triggers a paranoid outburst.
Synonyms
fad, vogue, trend, fashion, enthusiasm, passion, infatuation, love, obsession, mania, compulsion, fixation, fetish, weakness, fancy, taste, novelty, whim, fascination, preoccupation, rage
informal thing
verb [with object]
1 (usually as adjective crazed) Make (someone) wildly insane or out of control: a crazed killer...
- He was very small, and looked terrified when four half-starved and dementedly crazed teenagers opened the door and almost burst out, their eyes bulging.
- Her name would be splashed across the town weekly, her beaming smile belying the sick-to-her-stomach fear that some crazed madman was out there.
- Some crazed drivers refuse to let children cross the road in safety and insist on driving around them, honking their horns and shaking their fists as they do.
Synonyms
mad, insane, out of one's mind, deranged, demented, certifiable, lunatic, wild, raving, distraught, berserk, manic, maniac, frenzied, hysterical, psychopathic;
British sectionable
informal crazy, mental, off one's head, out of one's head, raving mad
2Produce a network of fine cracks on (a surface): the loch was frozen over but crazed with cracks...
- From a distance, it could be plaster of Paris, but up close there is no mistaking the fine, crazed lines of human skin.
- Tap the shells with the back of a spoon to craze them, then peel.
- The works feature bits of architecture, coloured blobs over the top and crazed, raised surfaces of paint, all lovingly laid down on miniature rectangles of MDF.
2.1 [no object] Develop fine cracks: internal stresses often caused the glue to craze...
- Such contact can cause crazing - the development of small cracks - in the material.
- They will cause the plastic to craze with minute cracks.
- In addition, Roma found that Makrolon will craze, but the cracks won't propagate all the way through the material.
Origin
Late Middle English (in the sense 'break, produce cracks'): perhaps of Scandinavian origin and related to Swedish krasa 'crunch'.