Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A unit of explosive force equal to that of one million metric tons of TNT.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A measure of the strength of an explosion or a bomb based on how many million tons of TNT would be needed to produce the same energy.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a measure of explosive power (of an atomic weapon) equal to that of one million tons of TNT
  • noun one million tons

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

metric prefix mega- +‎ ton

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Examples

  • You can fleece the contents of the "good" bar owners 'safe in megaton and its not like they end up going out of business or anything.

    A Tendency For Violence SVGL 2008

  • First off, I think people don't quite understand that GDC isn't a trade show, like E3 or TGS; it's an event that's for game developers, and when it's viewed in that light, Nintendo's announcements were relatively high on the "megaton" scale.

    What Can Nintendo Say That Will Impress You? SVGL 2009

  • Final Fantasy XIII for Xbox 360 was the blow-out announcement of last year's show, Sony made the so-called "megaton" of their conference with the announcement of

    1UP RSS feed 2009

  • It's obviously trying to get the biggest announcement bang for its many bucks spent on booth space, so expect any "megaton" announcements to happen next week, not this week.

    Kotaku 2009

  • They literally think a suicide bomb is is more powerful than a ten megaton warhead.

    Matthew Yglesias » Breitbart on Podesta 2010

  • I would wager that Team B was the reason that, when I was in nuclear forces, we were told that though the number of warheads on a Soviet missile was classified, it was probably 10 to 12 forty megaton warheads.

    Matthew Yglesias » Cold War Hawks and the Soviet Economy 2010

  • Eric Eisenbud: Svelte, swarthy, epicurian and 50 megaton-magnitude fresser.

    February « 2010 « Off The Broiler 2010

  • I would wager that Team B was the reason that, when I was in nuclear forces, we were told that though the number of warheads on a Soviet missile was classified, it was probably 10 to 12 forty megaton warheads.

    Matthew Yglesias » Cold War Hawks and the Soviet Economy 2010

  • The B53's disassembly ends the era of big megaton bombs, said Hans Kristensen, a spokesman for the Federation of American Scientists.

    Biggest US nuclear bomb dismantled in Texas 2011

  • In the cold war, the Soviets had thousands of megaton yield warheads targeted on US soil.

    Edge Of Forever | ATTACKERMAN 2009

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