Picture something enormous rising and closing over something small, until the small thing cannot be seen at all. A wave over a boat, smoke over a stairway, cloud over a valley. Three things are always true: what arrives is far bigger, it covers everything and not just a side, and what is covered goes out of sight. Change the big thing from water to fear, or to a crisis, and the rest of the picture stays exactly the same.
From the word’s history
Wiktionary gives the word as en- + gulf. A gulf is a deep opening — the sea running into the land, or simply a great hollow. The prefix puts something into it. That is close to the picture the modern word still uses: something big opens, and what falls inside disappears.
Wiktionary 記錄這個字來自 en-（進入）加 gulf（海灣、深淵）。gulf 是一個又大又深的開口。en- 把東西放進去。這條線索和它今天的用法很接近：大的東西張開，進去的就不見了。所以無論主詞是水、是情緒還是一場危機，畫面都是同一個。
Wiktionary entry for engulf, kaikki extract source_ref kaikki:3f6f69a190036ae4:798351580 — etymology_text: From en- + gulf.
登入就可以看每一支怎麼連回核心畫面。