Did stocks "crash"?

Some news organizations and investors are hesitating to use the word to describe Wall Street's terrifying sell-off.

A crash is commonly defined as a 20 percent decline in a single day or several days. The drop over the seven days ending Thursday lopped 20.9 percent off the Dow Jones industrial average, which would qualify as a crash. On Friday, the Dow fell again, bringing the cumulative loss to 22 percent.

"This quick, this amount, in these few days, obviously is a crash," said Howard Silverblatt, senior index analyst at Standard & Poor's. "The crash deals with the speed as well as the intensity of it."

CNBC host Dylan Ratigan was among those uttering the word on Thursday, calling the decline "a cascading crash." The Wall Street Journal, the most influential publication in the financial world, hedged somewhat on Friday's front page, saying the scary drop over the past several days "amounts to a slow-motion crash."