Pronounced: pul-LIL-uh-jee, noun
Notes: I didn’t know the word, but I’ve heard quite a bit of what it means (as I suspect many have)
Yesterday’s word
The word microburst has a pretty specific meaning: “a violent short-lived localized downdraft that creates extreme wind shears at low altitudes”
Background
Credit for this word is usually given to tornado expert Tetsuya Theodore Fujita.
I thought that the word had a more general meaning: that any intense, but short-lived thing could be a microburst. Regardless of my false understanding, microbursts are extremely dangerous for aircraft, and in the years since Mr Fujita described them, many airports have installed Doppler radar systems to help detect microbursts.
First usage
The word was used in 1974
Richard's Vocabulary Word-of-the-Day 