Calamity

1. n. A state or time of distress or misfortune; misery.
2. n. Any great misfortune or cause of misery; — generally applied to events or disasters which produce extensive evil, either to communities or individuals.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.