Break 1. Vt. To Cause To Be Broken (in Any Sense).

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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 a few years ago.

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