Excerpt from Semantic Antics by Sol Steinmetz

A great gift for your favorite linguophile.

EXPLODE, EXPLOSION
When explode came into English, before 1552, it meant "to reject, discard," as in "But the court una voce exploded this reason..." (1609, Francis Bacon, Works). Similarly, the first evidence of explosion was found in 1656, in Thomas Blount's Glossographia, where he defines the word: "Explosion, a casting off or rejecting, a hissing a thing out."

By "hissing out" Blount was harking back to the Latin meaning of the word. In Latin, explōdere was a theatrical word meaning "to clap, hoot, or hiss (an actor, play, etc.) off stage," and explōsiōnem meant "the act of rejecting or driving away by hissing, hooting, etc."

The modern meaning of these words are first found in the 1700s. Explosion, meaning "the action of bursting or going off with a loud noise," appeared in 1744, followed by 1790 by explode "(of gas, gunpowder, etc.) to burst or go off with a loud noise." The figurative meaning of an outburst or outbreak followed in the early 1800s in such phrases as to explode with fury, an explosion of laughter. A more recent figurative meaning of explosion, "a sudden and rapid increase or development," came into use in 1953 with population explosion. A corresponding verb appeared in 1959 in the New York Times: "The population in the Bandung area has exploded from 167,000...to 1,200,000 this year."