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Break off   /breɪk ɔf/   Listen
Break off

verb
1.
Interrupt before its natural or planned end.  Synonyms: break short, cut short.
2.
Prevent completion.  Synonyms: break, discontinue, stop.  "Break off the negotiations"
3.
Break off (a piece from a whole).  Synonyms: break away, chip, chip off, come off.
4.
Break a piece from a whole.  Synonyms: break, snap off.
5.
Break a small piece off from.  Synonyms: chip, cut off, knap.  "Chip a tooth"






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Break off" Quotes from Famous Books



... would remain in the midst of us, like the indestructible root of that nobility which we have destroyed—it would be the germ of a new aristocracy." Violent murmurs hailed these remarks of Robespierre. He was obliged to break off and apologise. "I see," he said in conclusion, "that we are no longer allowed to utter here, without reproach, opinions which our adversaries amongst the first have maintained ...
— History of the Girondists, Volume I - Personal Memoirs of the Patriots of the French Revolution • Alphonse de Lamartine

... and paragraphs to order. To produce an article of a given length, on a given subject, within a given time, was for her the severest of ordeals; here her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the space allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the point when she felt herself "beginning to begin." But she justly valued this apprenticeship as a professional experience, bringing her into direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect stranger. Once able to devote ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas

... was one day condemning man after man to death, Maecenas, after a vain attempt to reach him on the tribunal, where he sat surrounded by a dense crowd, wrote upon his tablets, Surge tandem, Carnifex!— "Butcher, break off!" and flung them across the crowd into the lap of Caesar, who felt the rebuke, and immediately quitted the judgment- seat. His policy was that of conciliation; and while bent on the establishment of ...
— Horace • Theodore Martin

... not understand,' he replied. 'I break off all communication with you here and now. You must give me a power of attorney ere you start to-night, and then be done with ...
— St Ives • Robert Louis Stevenson

... vividly, those self-made exiles from the mountains, and felt in them some unacknowledged loyalty to the soil, the barren soil which had borne them, some inarticulate affection which had lived through the heat and rage of their embattled lives. The taproot had been too deep for them to break off, and now from it there was springing up this unexpected stem, this sole survivor of their race who turned away from what had been the flaming breath of life in their brazen nostrils, back to the green fragrance of ...
— The Bent Twig • Dorothy Canfield


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