Earthquake Meaning

"Her alablaster brest she soft did kis, / Which all that while shee felt to pant and quake, / As it an Earth-quake were: at last she thus bespake." — 1590, Edmund Spenser, “Book III, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. […], London: […] [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

"I had just awoke at gun-fire (5 A.M.), when suddenly the thatch began to rustle and shake as if an army of cats were galloping over it, and immediately afterwards my bed shook too, so that for an instant I imagined myself back in New Guinea, in my fragile house, which shook when an old cock went to roost on the ridge; but remembering that I was now on a solid earthen floor, I said to myself, "Why, it's an earthquake," and lay still in the pleasing expectation of another shock; but none came, and this was the only earthquake I ever felt in Ternate." — 1869, Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago, volume II, London: Macmillan and Co., page 9:

"Last year's earthquake crushed his house, his livelihood and very nearly his leg, he said, pointing to a plastered limb that refuses to heal." — 2006 October 6, Declan Walsh, The Guardian:

"Since the response of some man-made structures to the ground motion near the epicenter is highly dependent on frequency, a significant difference in potential damage to the structures is expected between earthquakes and moonquakes." — 1988, Jürgen Oberst, Yosio Nakamura, “A seismic risk for the lunar base”, in The Second Conference on Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century, volume 1, NASA, pages 231–233:

"The wave patterns, too, are strikingly different: The secondary (S) waves and surface waves on lunar seismograms are not generally as clearly defined and distinct as are those of earthquakes." — 2006, Bruce A. Bolt, Earthquakes, Fifth Edition: