To break the news is to be the one who tells somebody something they will not want to hear. You stand in the hall working out the first sentence.
What gets broken here is nearly always bad, and that is the whole flavour of it — nobody breaks the news that dinner is ready. Break is the gentle sense, as in break a fall: you are softening the arrival rather than smashing anything. It takes to. Break it gently is the standing advice, and break it to somebody is the shortened everyday form.
1phrasebreak the newsTo be the one who tells somebody something important, and usually bad.
“Someone will have to break the news to his mother.”
break the news is an act of telling.
Practised in Common Word Pairs