1. To cause to be broken (in any sense)."Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands."2. (Of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged.The place where it stops is a "breakpoint".3. To send an EIA-232 break (two character widths of line high) over a serial line.4. [Unix] To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process.Normally, break, 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.6. pipeline break.7. break statement.[Jargon File](2004-03-24)