break
1. vt. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest
patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. v. (of a
program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place
where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3. [techspeak] vi. To send an
RS-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial comm
line. 4. [UNIX] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the
tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break
(sense 3), delete or control-C does this. 5. `break break'
may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb
doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in
turn probably came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as
badly abused in the Citizen's Band craze a few years ago.
