Interrupt

How to spell interrupt

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce interrupt

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does interrupt mean?

1. verbTo break in on someone who is speaking or on an activity in progress, stopping it briefly or for good.
2. nounA signal that tells a processor to pause its current task and attend to a more urgent event.

Interrupt in a sentence

• verb

  Please do not interrupt the speaker until the question session begins.

• noun

  The keyboard sends an interrupt to the processor each time a key is pressed.

• verb

  A sudden power cut can interrupt the entire production line.

• noun

  The engineer traced the crash to a missing interrupt handler in the driver.

Where does interrupt come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes from the Latin verb interrumpere, which meant literally 'to break apart in the middle' or 'to break off', formed from inter, meaning 'between', and rumpere, meaning 'to break'. The same rumpere root gives us a whole family of English words about breaking, including 'rupture', 'erupt', 'corrupt', and 'abrupt', and noticing that shared 'rupt' chunk is the surest way to remember the spelling. English took the word up in the fifteenth century, first in the sense of breaking the continuity of something such as a journey, a flow of water, or a stretch of time. From there it narrowed to its common modern meaning of cutting across someone while they are speaking or acting. The doubled 'r' is the spelling trap, and it survives precisely because the prefix inter- meets the root and both letters are pronounced.

How the word is built

• inter- (between)
• rupt (from Latin rumpere: to break)