Definition of "boom"

Did you ever hear a bittern booming?

1902, Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles

I was about to reach for the marmalade, when I heard the telephone tootling out in the hall and rose to attend to it. “Bertram Wooster's residence,” I said, having connected with the instrument. “Wooster in person at this end. Oh hullo,” I added, for the voice that boomed over the wire was that of Mrs Thomas Portarlington Travers of Brinkley Court, Market Snodsbury, near Droitwich – or, putting it another way, my good and deserving Aunt Dahlia. [...] “I'd give a tenner to have Aubrey Upjohn here at this moment.” “You can get him for nothing. He's in Uncle Tom's study.” Her face lit up. “He is?” [Aunt Dahlia] threw her head back and inflated the lungs. “UPJOHN!” she boomed, rather like someone calling the cattle home across the sands of Dee, and I issued a kindly word of warning. “Watch that blood pressure, old ancestor.”

1960, P[elham] G[renville] Wodehouse, “I and XVII”, in Jeeves in the Offing, London: Herbert Jenkins

Miles on miles of quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid ground, and by deep and sullen pools fringed with tall rushes, in which the bitterns boomed and the frogs croaked incessantly[.]

1886 October – 1887 January, H[enry] Rider Haggard, She: A History of Adventure, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., published 1887

If you pull this off every paper in England and America will be booming you.

1922, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Problem of Thor Bridge

She comes booming down before it.

1841, Benjamin Totten, Naval Text-book and Dictionary […]

It can get fast enough that it's hard to see what flashed on your screen though, so it would be nice if chess engines had a feature of persistently showing you what move they planned to play before they boomed, even if it took less than a second for them to figure it out.

2021 January 23, Bram Cohen, “You're doing computer chess game commentary wrong”, in Medium‎, archived from the original on 2022-12-06

In its White game Stockfish had various moments of booming during these long thinks, but these long thinks always ended disappointingly in a slightly lower evaluation than it started with.

2022 April 22, Matthew Sadler, “TCEC Season 22 SuperFinal: Komodo Dragon vs Stockfish”, in TCEC‎, archived from the original on 2022-12-13

Some of the minor Welsh 2 ft. gauge railways, we hear from Mr. N. F. G. Dalston, are enjoying a miniature boom owing to the demand for slate for the repair of damaged roofs.

1941 March, “Notes and News: The Demand for Slate”, in Railway Magazine, page 141

Interestingly, the blue monkey's boom and pyow calls are both long-distance signals (Brown, 1989), yet the two calls differ in respect to their susceptibility to habitat-induced degradation.

1990, Mark A. Berkley, William C. Stebbins, Comparative Perception

Some chess commentators know to excitedly point out when booms happen but they almost universally are missing out on the next step of explaining what the boom meant.

2021 January 23, Bram Cohen, “You're doing computer chess game commentary wrong”, in Medium‎, archived from the original on 2022-12-06

The evaluation boom and moob continued as Stockfish headed for a queen-rook-knight vs queen-rook-knight position that looked pretty nasty to me!

2022 April 22, Matthew Sadler, “TCEC Season 22 SuperFinal: Komodo Dragon vs Stockfish”, in TCEC‎, archived from the original on 2022-12-13

In regards to what happened to Mutsu, well, it went BOOM. To be more prosaic about it, there were a number of theories put forward as to why Mutsu's magazine for its aft superfiring turret exploded, some of them more plausible than others.

2020 January 12, Drachinifel, 47:06 from the start, in The Drydock - Episode 076‎, archived from the original on 26 September 2022

So we went around the corner, looked in the garbage, and, boom, there's about 16 of the tapes he didn't like!

1993, Vibe, volume 1, number 2

Hostile race relations and chronic unemployment are ignored in the suburbs of Paris, London and Sydney, and boom! there are riots.

2013, Peter Westoby, Gerard Dowling, Theory and Practice of Dialogical Community Development

I went out on the timber boom and made a few casts, but with little success.

1886, Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, translated by H.L. Brækstad, Folk and Fairy Tales, page 152

The wooden upright was now standing in the middle of the floor, and the two booms were fitted into its grooved side and hoisted as high as hands could reach. [...] Two by two, one at each end, the students proceeded along the boom, hanging by their hands, monkey-wise. [...] Two by two the students somersaulted upwards on to the high boom, turned to a sitting position sideways, and then slowly stood up on the narrow ledge.

1948, Josephine Tey, Miss Pym Disposes

“If you look at South Florida right now, this place is booming,” Mr. DeSantis said recently. “Los Angeles isn’t booming. New York City isn’t booming.”

2021 March 22, Neil Vigdor, Michael Majchrowicz, Azi Paybarah, quoting Ron DeSantis, “Miami Beach, Overwhelmed by Spring Break, Extends Emergency Curfew”, in The New York Times‎

Over this period, as plants boomed, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere dropped by 90 per cent, triggering a period of global cooling.

2020, Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life, page 145