Hiatus

How to spell hiatus

6 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce hiatus

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hiatus mean?

1. nounA pause or gap in a continuous activity, process, or sequence.

Hiatus in a sentence

• The band returned to the studio after a five-year hiatus.

• She took a brief hiatus from work to care for her father.

Where does hiatus come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes directly from the Latin noun hiatus, which meant a gaping opening or a cleft, and was formed from the verb hiare, meaning 'to gape' or 'to yawn'. English adopted it in the middle of the 1500s, at first in the literal Latin sense of a physical gap or opening between two things. From there it broadened into the figurative meaning that dominates today: a break, pause, or interruption in something that is otherwise continuous, such as a career or a broadcast schedule. A more technical sense survives in linguistics, where a hiatus is the small break in sound when two vowels meet across a boundary without a consonant between them, which is rather fitting given the original idea of a mouth left open. Because the word was taken whole from Latin without being reshaped through French, the spelling keeps its tidy Latin ending, and the trap for writers is the quiet -atus close, easily slipped to -ation or misheard in the unstressed final syllable.

How the word is built

• hiat- (from Latin hiare: to gape, to yawn)
• -us (Latin noun ending)