Other forms: fractured, fractures, fracturing
A fracture is a break in a bone. The X-ray comes back, the doctor turns the screen round and points at a thin dark line across your wrist: that line is the fracture.
Fracture is the verb as well — you fracture an ankle, and the ankle is fractured. Doctors name the kinds: a hairline fracture you can limp about on for a week without knowing, a compound fracture where the bone comes through the skin, a stress fracture from too much running on hard ground. Geologists borrow the word for rock, where a mineral's fracture is the shape of the surface it makes when it snaps somewhere other than along a clean plane, which is why flint and obsidian are said to have a conchoidal fracture, curved like the inside of a shell. It goes figurative too: a fractured party, a fractured friendship, a country fractured along old lines. Break is the word you use out loud; fracture is the word on the form.
1nounfractureA break or crack, especially in a bone.
“The scan showed a small fracture at the base of his thumb.”
2verbbrokenTo break or crack something, or to be broken or cracked.
“She fractured her wrist falling off her bike outside the shop.”
3nounrockThe way a mineral or rock breaks where there is no clean plane to split along, and the shape of the surface this leaves.
“Obsidian has a conchoidal fracture, curving like the inside of a shell.”
4nounholdA split in something that used to hold together, such as a group or a relationship.
“The vote exposed a fracture that had been widening for years.”
Fracture came through Old French from Latin frāctūra, a breach or cleft, built on frango, to break. Behind that is the Proto-Indo-European root bʰreg-, which walked into English by another road entirely and became the plain word break.
Latin
frāctūra
Old French
fracture
Middle English
fracture
English, today
fracture
Built from
From Middle English fracture, from Old French fracture, from Latin frāctūra. From Middle English fracture, from Old French fracture, from Latin frāctūra (“a breach, fracture, cleft”), from frango (“to break”), past participle frāctus, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European bʰreg-, whence also English break. See fraction. a doublet of fraktur.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA