Breakup

How to spell breakup

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce breakup

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does breakup mean?

1. nounThe ending of a personal relationship, especially a romantic one.
2. nounThe splitting apart or collapse of an organisation, system, or larger whole into separate parts.

Breakup in a sentence

• The breakup left her single for the first time in years.

• Regulators ordered the breakup of the monopoly into smaller firms.

• He wrote a whole album about their messy breakup.

• The breakup of the old empire created a dozen new countries.

Where does breakup come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is a native English compound built from two very old words. The first element, 'break', descends from the Old English verb brecan, which meant to shatter, burst, or force apart, and it traces back through the Germanic family to a root meaning to divide into pieces. The second element, 'up', comes from the Old English upp, an everyday directional word that here adds the sense of a process reaching completion or coming undone. English speakers had used the two-word phrasal verb 'break up' for centuries to describe things falling apart or gatherings dispersing, but the single fused noun 'breakup' is comparatively modern, becoming common only from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The closed-up spelling is exactly the trap: as a noun it is written as one word, whereas the action verb stays two separate words ('they decided to break up'), which is why writers so often add a stray space.

How the word is built

• break (Old English brecan: to shatter or separate)
• up (adverb particle) forming a compound noun