Thesaurus results for TINDERBOXES

tinderboxes

noun

Definition of tinderboxes next

plural of tinderbox

as in volcanoes

a potentially explosive place or situation officials sought to calm the situation, which had grown into a tinderbox

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as in crises

a time or state of affairs requiring prompt or decisive action while the country's prime minister was meeting with the U.S. president, a political tinderbox was igniting at home

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Example Sentences

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Recent Examples of tinderboxes The Industrial Revolution, supercharged by the Civil War, transformed Northeastern cities into denser and denser wooden tinderboxes filled with tons of humans more than capable of accidentally generating sparks. —

Noah Haggerty, Los Angeles Times, 2 Apr. 2026 Unlike natural thinning, large fire-resilient trees are typically high-graded for felling in Jackson, creating tinderboxes of 300 to 500 mostly juvenile trees per acre. —

John P. O’Brien, Mercury News, 13 Sep. 2025

Recent Examples of Synonyms for tinderboxes

Noun

The Island of Hawaii features three famous volcanoes — Kilauea with its spectacular eruptions, Mauna Kea and its spectacular sunsets, and Mauna Loa, the world’s highest mountain when measured from its underwater base to the summit.

— Joe Yogerst, Forbes.com, 28 May 2026
The other satellite system, NASA-ISRO Synthetic Aperture Radar (NISAR), typically uses radar imaging to continually map and track changes across the Earth’s surface, including earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, and ice sheet collapses.

— Jeremy Hsu, ArsTechnica, 27 May 2026