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crash program

American

noun

a plan of action entailing rapid and intensive production, growth, or the like, undertaken to meet a deadline or solve a pressing problem.

a crash program to develop a new fighter plane.

Etymology

Origin of crash program

First recorded in 1945–50

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

In the early 1980s, he led the fight against a crash program to map all human genes, fearing, once again, unknown consequences.

From Los Angeles Times • Sep. 8, 2025

Manhattan Project, the World War II–era crash program to build the first-ever atomic bombs.

From Scientific American • Jul. 21, 2023

Much of the pain and disruption that will result from the now-necessary crash program would have been avoided.

From Washington Post • Apr. 30, 2023

Bright says he lobbied for a crash program to make COVID-19 vaccines—a pandemic “Manhattan Project”—which Navarro spelled out in a memo on 9 February 2020 to the White House’s Coronavirus Task Force.

From Science Magazine • Jan. 6, 2022

Now Ernest launched a crash program to convert it into a gigantic mass spectrograph containing several calutrons, each with multiple ion sources and collectors.

From "Big Science" by Michael Hiltzik

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023