| break up | | |
| v. (motion) | 1. break up, dispel, disperse, dissipate, scatter | to cause to separate and go in different directions.; "She waved her hand and scattered the crowds" |
| ~ disband | cause to break up or cease to function.; "the principal disbanded the political student organization" |
| ~ divide, separate | make a division or separation. |
| v. (social) | 2. break, break up, part, separate, split, split up | discontinue an association or relation; go different ways.; "The business partners broke over a tax question"; "The couple separated after 25 years of marriage"; "My friend and I split up" |
| ~ give the bounce, give the gate, give the axe | terminate a relationship abruptly.; "Mary gave John the axe after she saw him with another woman" |
| ~ disunify, break apart | break up or separate.; "The country is disunifying"; "Yugoslavia broke apart after 1989" |
| ~ disassociate, disjoint, dissociate, disunite, divorce | part; cease or break association with.; "She disassociated herself from the organization when she found out the identity of the president" |
| ~ break with | end a relationship.; "China broke with Russia" |
| ~ split up, divorce | get a divorce; formally terminate a marriage.; "The couple divorced after only 6 months" |
| ~ secede, splinter, break away | withdraw from an organization or communion.; "After the break up of the Soviet Union, many republics broke away" |
| ~ break away, break | interrupt a continued activity.; "She had broken with the traditional patterns" |
| v. (motion) | 3. break up | come apart.; "the group broke up" |
| ~ disband, dissolve | stop functioning or cohering as a unit.; "The political wing of the party dissolved after much internal fighting" |
| ~ part, split, separate | go one's own way; move apart.; "The friends separated after the party" |
| v. (contact) | 4. break apart, break up, crash | break violently or noisily; smash. |
| ~ disintegrate | break into parts or components or lose cohesion or unity.; "The material disintegrated"; "the group disintegrated after the leader died" |
| ~ crash | cause to crash.; "The terrorists crashed the plane into the palace"; "Mother crashed the motorbike into the lamppost" |
| v. (communication) | 5. break up, cut off, disrupt, interrupt | make a break in.; "We interrupt the program for the following messages" |
| ~ cut off, cut | cease, stop.; "cut the noise"; "We had to cut short the conversation" |
| ~ break off, discontinue, stop, break | prevent completion.; "stop the project"; "break off the negotiations" |
| ~ punctuate | interrupt periodically.; "Her sharp questions punctuated the speaker's drone" |
| ~ break | interrupt the flow of current in.; "break a circuit" |
| ~ put aside, put away | turn away from and put aside, perhaps temporarily.; "it's time for you to put away childish things" |
| ~ intermit, pause, break | cease an action temporarily.; "We pause for station identification"; "let's break for lunch" |
| ~ butt in, chime in, chisel in, barge in, break in, cut in, put in | break into a conversation.; "her husband always chimes in, even when he is not involved in the conversation" |
| ~ burst in on, burst upon | spring suddenly.; "He burst upon our conversation" |
| ~ heckle | challenge aggressively. |
| ~ interject, interpose, throw in, come in, inject, put in | to insert between other elements.; "She interjected clever remarks" |
| ~ block, jam | interfere with or prevent the reception of signals.; "Jam the Voice of America"; "block the signals emitted by this station" |
| ~ stop over, stop | interrupt a trip.; "we stopped at Aunt Mary's house"; "they stopped for three days in Florence" |
| ~ take time off, take off | take time off from work; stop working temporarily. |
| v. (change) | 6. break up, dissolve, resolve | cause to go into a solution.; "The recipe says that we should dissolve a cup of sugar in two cups of water" |
| ~ change integrity | change in physical make-up. |
| ~ melt, melt down, run | reduce or cause to be reduced from a solid to a liquid state, usually by heating.; "melt butter"; "melt down gold"; "The wax melted in the sun" |
| ~ dissolve | pass into a solution.; "The sugar quickly dissolved in the coffee" |
| ~ cut | dissolve by breaking down the fat of.; "soap cuts grease" |
| v. (emotion) | 7. break up, collapse, crack, crack up, crock up | suffer a nervous breakdown. |
| ~ suffer, sustain, have, get | undergo (as of injuries and illnesses).; "She suffered a fracture in the accident"; "He had an insulin shock after eating three candy bars"; "She got a bruise on her leg"; "He got his arm broken in the scuffle" |
| v. (creation) | 8. break apart, break up, disassemble, dismantle, take apart | take apart into its constituent pieces. |
| ~ destroy, destruct | do away with, cause the destruction or undoing of.; "The fire destroyed the house" |
| v. (contact) | 9. break, break up | destroy the completeness of a set of related items.; "The book dealer would not break the set" |
| ~ alter, change, modify | cause to change; make different; cause a transformation.; "The advent of the automobile may have altered the growth pattern of the city"; "The discussion has changed my thinking about the issue" |
| ~ break | exchange for smaller units of money.; "I had to break a $100 bill just to buy the candy" |
| v. (contact) | 10. break up, sever | set or keep apart.; "sever a relationship" |
| ~ disunite, separate, part, divide | force, take, or pull apart.; "He separated the fighting children"; "Moses parted the Red Sea" |
| ~ lop, discerp, sever | cut off from a whole.; "His head was severed from his body"; "The soul discerped from the body" |
| v. (contact) | 11. break up, pick | attack with or as if with a pickaxe of ice or rocky ground, for example.; "Pick open the ice" |
| ~ hack, chop | cut with a hacking tool. |
| ~ pierce | cut or make a way through.; "the knife cut through the flesh"; "The path pierced the jungle"; "Light pierced through the forest" |
| v. (contact) | 12. break up, calve | release ice.; "The icebergs and glaciers calve" |
| ~ divide, part, separate | come apart.; "The two pieces that we had glued separated" |
| v. (change) | 13. adjourn, break up, recess | close at the end of a session.; "The court adjourned" |
| ~ end, cease, terminate, finish, stop | have an end, in a temporal, spatial, or quantitative sense; either spatial or metaphorical.; "the bronchioles terminate in a capillary bed"; "Your rights stop where you infringe upon the rights of other"; "My property ends by the bushes"; "The symphony ends in a pianissimo" |
| v. (change) | 14. break up, dissolve | bring the association of to an end or cause to break up.; "The decree officially dissolved the marriage"; "the judge dissolved the tobacco company" |
| ~ dismiss, dissolve | declare void.; "The President dissolved the parliament and called for new elections" |
| ~ terminate, end | bring to an end or halt.; "She ended their friendship when she found out that he had once been convicted of a crime"; "The attack on Poland terminated the relatively peaceful period after WW I" |
| v. (change) | 15. break up, dissolve | come to an end.; "Their marriage dissolved"; "The tobacco monopoly broke up" |
| ~ terminate, end | bring to an end or halt.; "She ended their friendship when she found out that he had once been convicted of a crime"; "The attack on Poland terminated the relatively peaceful period after WW I" |
| v. (change) | 16. break up, fragment, fragmentise, fragmentize | break or cause to break into pieces.; "The plate fragmented" |
| ~ atomise, atomize | break up into small particles.; "the fine powder had been atomized by air" |
| ~ comminute, bray, mash, crunch, grind | reduce to small pieces or particles by pounding or abrading.; "grind the spices in a mortar"; "mash the garlic" |
| ~ pound | break down and crush by beating, as with a pestle.; "pound the roots with a heavy flat stone" |
| ~ come apart, break, fall apart, split up, separate | become separated into pieces or fragments.; "The figurine broke"; "The freshly baked loaf fell apart" |
| ~ sunder | break apart or in two, using violence. |
| ~ sliver, splinter | break up into splinters or slivers.; "The wood splintered" |
| ~ rag | break into lumps before sorting.; "rag ore" |
| ~ crumb | break into crumbs. |
| ~ brecciate | break into breccia.; "brecciate rock" |
| ~ crush | break into small pieces.; "The car crushed the toy" |
| ~ grind, grate | make a grating or grinding sound by rubbing together.; "grate one's teeth in anger" |
| v. (change) | 17. break up, disperse, scatter | cause to separate.; "break up kidney stones"; "disperse particles" |
| ~ change integrity | change in physical make-up. |
| ~ backscatter | scatter (radiation) by the atoms of the medium through which it passes. |
| v. (change) | 18. break down, break up, decompose | separate (substances) into constituent elements or parts. |
| ~ chemical science, chemistry | the science of matter; the branch of the natural sciences dealing with the composition of substances and their properties and reactions. |
| ~ digest | soften or disintegrate by means of chemical action, heat, or moisture. |
| ~ dissociate | to undergo a reversible or temporary breakdown of a molecule into simpler molecules or atoms.; "acids dissociate to give hydrogen ions" |
| ~ crack | reduce (petroleum) to a simpler compound by cracking. |
| ~ separate | divide into components or constituents.; "Separate the wheat from the chaff" |
| v. (body) | 19. break up, crack up | laugh unrestrainedly. |
| ~ express joy, express mirth, laugh | produce laughter. |
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