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"Overwhelming" as an adjective means very great in ammount or very strong. As a verb, it can be used figuratively to mean "have large emotional impact on" and has a sense of "too much to quickly" . What can I say in Esperanto?

  • It was an overwhelming exprience.
  • The studies at the university are overwhelming.
  • There is an overwhelming amount of evidence.
  • The fear was overwhelming.
  • I was overwhelmed by the sudden commitment of the team.
  • She was overwhelmed with grief.
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    I originally learned "supersxutita" for overwhelmed, but I won't give it as an answer as I'm unsure of it. I only mention it because it wasn't mentioned in any of the answers.
    – Chris McDowell
    Dec 2, 2016 at 14:40
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    I've certainly heard superŝutita used in the sense of "overwhelmed with work".
    – Tim Morley
    Dec 6, 2016 at 11:55

3 Answers 3

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Benson (CEED) lists several possibilities for "overwhelm" in its various forms - dronigi, subigi, superverŝi, stuporiga, neeltenebla, ne povi elteni.

For "overwhelming experience" you could consider tre emocia.

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The original meaning of whelm was "to turn upside down", and overwhelm may have originally meant "to capsize", and thus "to submerge." A lot of this is preserved in modern usage.

So, the closest you can get to a general translation is renversi with some connotations of mergi, submergi. However, I think it is better to choose a more specific verb for individual cases.

  • Ĝi estis renversanta/troŝarĝa sperto.

  • Miaj studoj ĉe la universitato estas trostreĉaj.

  • Ekzistas kvanto supersufiĉa da pruvoj.

  • La timo estis korprema.

  • Min ege kortuŝis la tuja sindevontigo de la teamo.

  • Ŝin subigis malĝojo.

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Invent a new word if you like or take a look at the following link: http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-esperanto/overwhelming

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    I was not familiar with this dictionary. It looks like it consists of user-submitted words and I also found the following: "Parts of the English-Esperanto dictionary are based on ESPDIC" -- based on this, I would not recommend this dictionary to people learning Esperanto.
    – Tomaso Alexander
    Nov 30, 2016 at 21:17
  • What is ESPDIC? I used it only as an example and not as gospel. You may be right though. Help me understand.
    – Karlomanio
    Nov 30, 2016 at 22:11
  • I had no idea bab.la supports Esperanto! I've used that dictionary before for German and English. Maybe not the best one, but it has still helped me much. In my opinion, it is good that Esperanto is visible in multilingual webpages. Bab.la actually contains mojosa, that is more than PIV, haha.
    – Antonia Montaro
    Dec 1, 2016 at 19:19
  • I actually thoroughly used bab.la when I learned Esperanto. It was the first dictionary I found online when I searched for one. Later on, when I had advanced some, I started seeing discrepancies and realizing that it probably wasn't the best reference. It's sort of like tatoeba.org - use at your own risk. I still use it to get a general idea when I don't know where to start, then look up the words it gives me in vortaro.net to see if they are viable.
    – Chris McDowell
    Dec 2, 2016 at 14:40

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