Word Type
Break can be a verb or a noun.
break used as a verb:
- To end up in two or more pieces that can't easily be reassembled.
"If the vase falls to the floor, it might break." - Of a bone, to crack or fracture through a sudden physical strain, such as a collision.
"Don't slip and break your leg." - Of a bone, to cause to crack under physical strain.
"Don't try to break his neck." - Of a bone, to fracture accidentally.
"Don't break your fingers playing basketball." - To stop functioning properly or altogether.
"On the hottest day of the year the fridge broke." - To interrupt or cease one's work or occupation temporarily.
"Let's break for lunch." - To win a game as receiver.
"He needs to break serve to win the match." - To make the first shot.
"Is it your or my turn to break?" - To cause to end up in two or more pieces.
"I am going to break your mask." - To cause to malfunction or stop working altogether.
"Did you two break the trolley by racing with it?" - To cause a person or animal to lose his/her/its will, usually obtained by means of torture.A wave breaking (definition 13)
"You have to break an elephant before you can use it as an animal of burden." - To do that which is forbidden by (a rule or rules).
"When you go to Vancouver, promise me you won't break the law." - To collapse into surf, after arriving in shallow water.
- To design or use a powerful (yet legal) strategy that unbalances the game in a player's favor.
"Letting white have three extra queens would break chess." - to disclose or make known an item of news etc
- to end
"The forecast says the hot weather will break by midweek" - To ruin financially.
"Local economic problems broke some smaller banks." - To divide into smaller units.
"The wholesaler broke the container loads into palettes and boxes for local retailers." - to arrive
"Morning has broken."
Verbs are action words and state of being words. Examples of action words are: ran, attacking, dreamed. Examples of "state of being" words are: is, was, be. Learn more →
break used as a noun:
- An instance of breaking something into two pieces.
"The femur has a clean break and so should heal easily." - A physical space that opens up in something or between two things.
"The sun came out in a break in the clouds." - A rest or pause, usually from work; a breaktime.
"Let’s take a five-minute break." - A lucky break.
- A game won by the receiving player(s).
- The first shot in a game of billiards
- The number of points scored by one player in one visit to the table
- Place where waves break (ie. pitch or spill forward creating white water).
"The final break in the Greenmount area is Kirra Point." - A short section of music, often between verses, in which some performers stop while others continue.
"The fiddle break was amazing, it was a pity the singer came back in on the wrong note." - a change; the end of a spell of persistent good or bad weather
Nouns are naming words. They are used to represent a person (soldier, Jamie), place (Germany, beach), thing (telephone, mirror), quality (hardness, courage), or an action (a run, a punch). Learn more →
Related Searches
What type of word is break?
- Verb usage: If the vase falls to the floor, it might break.
- Verb usage: Don't slip and break your leg.
- Verb usage: Then his fifth metatarsal broke.
- Verb usage: Don't try to break his neck.
- Verb usage: Don't break your fingers playing basketball.
- Verb usage: On the hottest day of the year the fridge broke.
- Verb usage: Let's break for lunch.
- Verb usage: He needs to break serve to win the match.
- Verb usage: Is it your or my turn to break?
- Verb usage: I am going to break your mask.
- Verb usage: Did you two break the trolley by racing with it?
- Verb usage: You have to break an elephant before you can use it as an animal of burden.
- Verb usage: America has used many forms of torture to break their POWs.
- Verb usage: When you go to Vancouver, promise me you won't break the law.
- Verb usage: Letting white have three extra queens would break chess.
- Verb usage: The forecast says the hot weather will break by midweek
- Verb usage: Local economic problems broke some smaller banks.
- Verb usage: The wholesaler broke the container loads into palettes and boxes for local retailers.
- Verb usage: Can you break a hundred-dollar bill for me?
- Verb usage: Morning has broken.
- Verb usage: Dawn broke over the hills.
- Noun usage: The femur has a clean break and so should heal easily.
- Noun usage: The sun came out in a break in the clouds.
- Noun usage: Let’s take a five-minute break.
- Noun usage: The final break in the Greenmount area is Kirra Point.
- Noun usage: The fiddle break was amazing, it was a pity the singer came back in on the wrong note.
Unfortunately, with the current database that runs this site, I don't have data about which senses of break are used most commonly. I've got ideas about how to fix this but will need to find a source of "sense" frequencies. Hopefully there's enough info above to help you understand the part of speech of break, and guess at its most common usage.
Word Type
For those interested in a little info about this site: it's a side project that I developed while working on Describing Words and Related Words. Both of those projects are based around words, but have much grander goals. I had an idea for a website that simply explains the word types of the words that you search for - just like a dictionary, but focussed on the part of speech of the words. And since I already had a lot of the infrastructure in place from the other two sites, I figured it wouldn't be too much more work to get this up and running.
The dictionary is based on the amazing Wiktionary project by wikimedia. I initially started with WordNet, but then realised that it was missing many types of words/lemma (determiners, pronouns, abbreviations, and many more). This caused me to investigate the 1913 edition of Websters Dictionary - which is now in the public domain. However, after a day's work wrangling it into a database I realised that there were far too many errors (especially with the part-of-speech tagging) for it to be viable for Word Type.
Finally, I went back to Wiktionary - which I already knew about, but had been avoiding because it's not properly structured for parsing. That's when I stumbled across the UBY project - an amazing project which needs more recognition. The researchers have parsed the whole of Wiktionary and other sources, and compiled everything into a single unified resource. I simply extracted the Wiktionary entries and threw them into this interface! So it took a little more work than expected, but I'm happy I kept at it after the first couple of blunders.
Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: the UBY project (mentioned above), @mongodb and express.js.
Currently, this is based on a version of wiktionary which is a few years old. I plan to update it to a newer version soon and that update should bring in a bunch of new word senses for many words (or more accurately, lemma).
