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• timebomb, time-bomb

語源

From time +‎ bomb.

発音

名詞

time bomb (plural time bombs)

1. A bomb that has a mechanism such that detonation can be preset to a particular time.
   • 1957 October, “Notes and News: Bomb Hoax at Tempsford”, in Railway Magazine, pages 735, 736:

     At 9.40 a.m. on Bank Holiday Monday, August 5, a ganger found what was thought to be a time bomb at a level crossing at Tempsford, near Biggleswade, Bedfordshire, […] Inside one box was a brick; the other contained the works of an old alarm clock.

2. (computing) A malicious program designed to perform a destructive action at a certain date or time.
   • 1994, Peter G. Neumann, Computer-Related Risks‎, Addison-Wesley Professional, →ISBN:

     Donald Gene Burleson was prosecuted on felony charges for planting a time bomb that, shortly after he was fired, deleted more than 168,000 brokerage records of USPA & IRA in Fort Worth, Texas.

3. (figuratively) A situation that threatens to have disastrous consequences at some future time.

   Synonyms: ticking bomb, ticking time bomb

   • 2014 June 6, Françoise Fressoz, “France’s Ticking Time Bomb”, in The New York Times‎, →ISSN:

     Even so, they managed to morph the recent European parliamentary elections into a time bomb and plant it under their country’s own future.

   • 2023 May 31, Nigel Harris, “Comment: GBR now! We have no Plan B”, in RAIL, number 984, page 3:

     Someone must explain to Sunak about the time bomb ticking beneath his £1,000 loafers.

   • 2023 June 30, Marina Hyde, “The tide is coming in fast on Rishi Sunak – and it’s full of sewage”, in The Guardian‎:

     The pandemic preparation timebomb detonated to devastating effect; a number of other timebombs are on the shortest of fuses. The government has now reached a state of perfect vicious cycle, when the only thing worse than the things it does are all the things it didn’t get round to doing.

派生語

参考

• accident waiting to happen

固有名詞

Timebomb

1. (fandom slang) The ship of characters Ekko and Jinx from the video game League of Legends and the tie-in television series Arcane.