Definition of "flashbulb" [flash•bulb]

• A glass bulb filled with finely shredded aluminum or magnesium foil that is ignited by electricity to produce a short-duration high-intensity light flash for taking photographs. Also called photoflash. (noun)

American Heritage(R) Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright (c) 2011 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

• "Goliath is a horrific giant cyclops; the drowning sinners trying to claw their way onto Noah's Ark are caught in flashbulb moments of terror and agony; Saul's army rends the raw meat of their slaughter as they try to avoid starvation; the mutilated corpses of Baanah and Rechab dangle from nooses in Hebron; the boiled heads of donkeys emerge from the cooking pot as starving Israelites look on with hungry eyes; Daniel's horned beast crushes a mountain of screaming men and women as it stalks the land; and in Revelations, the rains of fire, floods and famine lay waste to cities as horribly burned famine victims scream and claw at their flesh."
• "Flashbangs produced an incredibly bright light—approximately two million candela, which even with eyes closed would cause a bleaching of the rhodopsin, the visual purple in the eye, creating the spots and temporary blindness most people have experienced and referred to as the flashbulb effect."
• "He added that so-called flashbulb memory of the kind that I had can be incredibly vivid and still be very wrong."