breakdancing

nounB1Very rare — outside the 30,000 commonest English words, so you will meet it in writing rather than in speechleans written

Breakdancing is a street style of spins and floor moves. Take up breakdancing.

It grew up in New York in the 1970s and became an Olympic sport in 2024. Breakdancing is named from the break, the drum section a DJ would loop for the dancers.

Definitions of breakdancing

1nounbreakdancingA street style of spins and floor moves.B1
“Breakdancing wrecks your wrists and everybody does it anyway.”

breakdancing is a dance.

Where it comes from

Break plus dancing, from the percussion break of a record that dancers waited for.

From break + dancing. Influenced by breakdown (the percussion break of songs chosen by a DJ for use in hip-hop music) -- breakdancers were originally those who danced to a breakdown.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Dance

Practise this word

breakdancing in the wild

Street dance is an umbrella term for a large number of social dance styles such as: breakdancing, popping, locking, house dance, waacking, voguing, hip-hop dance, etc.
Street dance
Like the parent movement, New Zealand hip hop consists of four parts: rapping, DJing, graffiti art and breakdancing.
New Zealand hip-hop
The first element of hip hop to reach New Zealand was breakdancing, which gained notoriety after the release of the 1979 movie The Warriors.
New Zealand hip-hop
In the 1980s, breakdancing was the first elements of hip-hop culture to preface the Irish hip-hop movement, which had started to emerge in Ireland.
Irish hip-hop
The Windmill (or briefly Mill) is a popular breakdancing move.
Windmill (breakdancing move)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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