tidal wave
The destruction caused by the typhoon is similar to that brought by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami in the Indian Ocean.
Americans are being asked to donate directly to charities that are already providing help to tsunami victims.
Every day since my husband died, a tsunami of grief has assaulted me.
Anyone with children is familiar with the tsunami of plastic toys that comes crashing through the house.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Waves
bore
break
breaker
broke
choppy
comber
crest
dumper
heavy
lap
overfall
roller
roughness
spume
tidal wave
wake
wave
white horses
whitecaps

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Masses and large amounts of things

Examples from literature

A tsunami followed minutes after this and killed thousands of people. 
And then the tsunami came. 
It shows that a tsunami is coming. 
The tsunami damaged the town. 
Tsunami is a Japanese word, but now we all know what it means. 

tsunami | American Dictionary

tsunami
noun[ C ]
us/sʊˈnɑ·mi, tsʊ-/
a very large and dangerous ocean wave that is caused by an earthquake under the sea

Examples of tsunami

tsunami
The results are used in conjunction with earlier one-dimensional analyses to estimate the total tsunami run-up.
Only when close to shore do tsunami sometimes assume such shapes.
Certainly the pharmaceutical money tsunami is having major adverse effects.
But they reserve their most serious warning for coastal and submarine landslides and the risk of tsunamis.
The refractive influence on tsunami run-up of the offshore bottom topography of islands is analyzed.
The most controversial section is that dealing with postulated tsunami-generated coastal forms, especially scoured bedrock surfaces.
It is of particular interest to infer tsunami run-up on island shores.
The disastrous effects of the tsunami are limited to coastal regions.
A more serious problem is the basic nature of the tsunami, which is brought into existence by a shallow shelving sea floor.
Therefore, all attempts to unravel tsunami activity worldwide throughout the historic period, however locally defined, should be welcomed.
Initially, this study arose from questions concerning the scattering of tsunamis as they propagate over the irregular topography of the deep waters of the ocean.
The tsunami is not felt in the open sea.
Several facets of the mathematical problem are rather fascinating but the results do suggest that scattering is not the most important part of the tsunami propagation.
Agricultural biotechnology has been described as a tsunami washing over agriculture - with fundamental impacts on how we grow and market our food and fiber.
Volcanic islands, whether they erupt or not, now seem to have been responsible for sea-level-linked tsunamis vastly larger than any caused by earthquakes.
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.