Other forms: interrupted, interrupts, interrupting
To interrupt someone is to cut in while they are still speaking. Your friend is halfway through a story, you jump in with a question, and the story never gets finished.
You interrupt people, and you also interrupt things: a power cut interrupts the film, roadworks interrupt the traffic, a phone call interrupts your afternoon. The noun is interruption — sorry for the interruption — and the object follows the verb directly, so you interrupt me, never interrupt to me. In computing an interrupt is a signal that stops a processor mid-task and sends it off to something more urgent. And the word carries a small charge of rudeness when it is about people: nobody thanks you for interrupting, which is why sorry to interrupt exists as a fixed opening.
1verbinterruptTo stop someone in the middle of speaking by speaking yourself.~2%
“Please stop interrupting me.”
synonyms: cut in, butt in
2verbbreakTo break the running of something so that it stops for a while.~40%
“The storm interrupted the match for an hour.”
3nouncomputingIn computing, a signal that stops a program so that a more urgent task can run.~58%
“The keyboard sends an interrupt every time you press a key.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 97 sentences found in the wild and placed 94 of them on a sense (3 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Latin took inter, between, and rumpo, to break, and built interrumpo: to break in between. That is what an interruption still is — not a stop but a break, made in the middle of something that was running.
Proto-Indo-European
*Hrewp-
Latin
interruptus
Middle English
interrupten
English, today
interrupt
Built from
From Middle English interrupten, derived from Latin interruptus, past participle of interrumpo (“to break apart/off, interrupt”), from inter (“between”) + rumpo (“to break”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA