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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 of
the early 1980s.
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