conflagration

plural conflagrations

1. countableuncountableA large fire extending to many objects, or over a large space; a general burning.

   It took sixty firefighters to put out the conflagration.

   1 more example

   And back to hell his way did he take, / For the Devil thought by a slight mistake / It was general conflagration.

   1834 [1799], Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, “The Devil's Thoughts”, in The Poetical Works of S. T. Coleridge, volume II, London: W. Pickering, page 87

   Synonyms: firestorm, inferno

2. countablefigurativelyuncountableA large-scale conflict.

   1 more example

   This was well brought out in the skillfully conducted campaigns by the various governments in appealing to the masses with their characteristic suggestible subconsciousness, stirring to the very depths the reflex consciousness of gregarious man by all sorts of direct and indirect suggestions of fear of attacks and patriotic reactions of self-defence against such attacks until the evil genie of self-preservation and fear became loose, resulting in a sweeping conflagration of a war of nations with all the horror of diseases, mutilation, and extermination of millions of human lives, over seventeen and a half millions, according to latest accounts, having perished in this world-massacre of the human race.

   1919, Boris Sidis, The Source and Aim of Human Progress

3. countablefigurativelyuncountableA situation of great passion or emotion.

   I thought it only an amourette when you told me. It was a fire — a conflagration; subdue it.

   1876, The New York Drama, volumes 1-2, page 1

   1 more example

   Nobody met me at the toy station where I alighted with my new expensive bag, and nobody answered the telephone; eventually, however, a distraught McCoo in wet clothes turned up at the only hotel of green-and-pink Ramsdale with the news that his house had just burned down - possibly, owing to the synchronous conflagration that had been raging all night in my veins.

   1955 September 15, Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Paris: The Olympia Press […], →OCLC