Other forms: breaks, broke, broken, breaking
To break something is to leave it in pieces. A mug that slips out of wet hands, a pencil snapped in half, the window and the football that went through it. It works both ways round, too: you break a plate, or the plate breaks — and the second version quietly leaves out who dropped it.
Machines break without anybody dropping them — the washing machine broke on Sunday — and so do promises, records, laws and hearts. As a noun, a break is a gap: the break between lessons, a coffee break, a break in the clouds, a break in the traffic long enough to cross. News breaks, day breaks, a voice breaks, a wave breaks on the beach. The past tense is broke and the past participle broken, and broken is also the adjective you want for a thing that has stopped working: the lift is broken. Then there are the phrasal verbs, which do half the word's work — break down, break up, break in, break out, break off — and each one means something you could not guess from the parts.
1verbsmashTo make something come apart into pieces, or to come apart.~42%
“Glass breaks if you drop it on tiles.”
2nounbreakA short stop in the middle of work or study.~47%
“We get a twenty-minute break at eleven.”
3verbmachineTo stop working, of a machine.~2%
“The heating breaks every winter without fail.”
4verbkeepTo fail to keep a rule, a promise or a record.~9%
“You break the law every time you cross there.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 140 sentences found in the wild and placed 74 of them on a sense (66 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: recess, playtime
Break has come the whole way from Proto-Indo-European doing exactly the job it does now: the root *bʰreg- meant break, Old English brecan meant break, and here it still is. German kept it as brechen, and French broyer, to crush and grind, is the same root wearing another coat.
Middle English
breken
English, today
break
From Middle English breken. From Middle English breken, from Old English brecan (“to break”), from Proto-West Germanic brekan, from Proto-Germanic brekaną (“to break”), from Proto-Indo-European bʰreg- (“to break”). a doublet of bray. 2
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA