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Break up   /breɪk əp/   Listen
Break up

verb
1.
To cause to separate and go in different directions.  Synonyms: dispel, disperse, dissipate, scatter.
2.
Discontinue an association or relation; go different ways.  Synonyms: break, part, separate, split, split up.  "The couple separated after 25 years of marriage" , "My friend and I split up"
3.
Come apart.
4.
Break violently or noisily; smash.  Synonyms: break apart, crash.
5.
Make a break in.  Synonyms: cut off, disrupt, interrupt.
6.
Cause to go into a solution.  Synonyms: dissolve, resolve.
7.
Suffer a nervous breakdown.  Synonyms: collapse, crack, crack up, crock up.
8.
Take apart into its constituent pieces.  Synonyms: break apart, disassemble, dismantle, take apart.  Antonym: assemble.
9.
Destroy the completeness of a set of related items.  Synonym: break.
10.
Set or keep apart.  Synonym: sever.
11.
Attack with or as if with a pickaxe of ice or rocky ground, for example.  Synonym: pick.
12.
Release ice.  Synonym: calve.
13.
Close at the end of a session.  Synonyms: adjourn, recess.
14.
Bring the association of to an end or cause to break up.  Synonym: dissolve.  "The judge dissolved the tobacco company"
15.
Come to an end.  Synonym: dissolve.  "The tobacco monopoly broke up"
16.
Break or cause to break into pieces.  Synonyms: fragment, fragmentise, fragmentize.
17.
Cause to separate.  Synonyms: disperse, scatter.  "Disperse particles"
18.
Separate (substances) into constituent elements or parts.  Synonyms: break down, decompose.
19.
Laugh unrestrainedly.  Synonym: crack up.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Break up" Quotes from Famous Books



... prouder and more important than ever, when there came another letter from the O'Donoghue, bringing the good news that she was grandmother to a fine little boy. Such grand calculations as she laid on this event. "Who knows," she said, "but that the heir will break up the long enchantment and grow up a good Christian, and come back and take possession of Ross Castle, and we'll be ruled by a rale Irish Prince ...
— Stories and Legends of Travel and History, for Children • Grace Greenwood

... the force was set to work to break up the Virginia Central; and for a distance of eighteen miles the telegraph, stations, tanks, and cars were burned, and the rails torn up, and bent ...
— The Campaign of Chancellorsville • Theodore A. Dodge

... the chief political mentor of modern Germany, Treitschke, who died in 1896. He was never tired of declaring that Britain was a decadent and degenerate state, that her empire was an unreal empire, and that it would collapse before the first serious attack. It would break up because it was not based upon force, because it lacked organisation, because it was a medley of disconnected and discordant fragments, worshipping an undisciplined freedom. That it should ever have come into being was one of the paradoxes ...
— The Expansion of Europe - The Culmination of Modern History • Ramsay Muir

... not thousand, dollars, and that it needs only a few of them on each ship that comes in to run up into the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands in a season, you will see how essential it is to break up that sort of thing. We've been getting after the individual private smugglers pretty sharply this summer and we've had lots of criticism. If we could land a big fellow and make an object-lesson of the extent of the thing I believe it would ...
— The Poisoned Pen • Arthur B. Reeve

... to the front he was taken prisoner in a disastrous battle, but he found means of informing his old friend Dr. Orton of the fact. Although the doctor was a rebel to the backbone, he swore he would "break up the Confederacy" if Haldane was not released, and through his influence the young man was soon brought to his friend's hospitable home, where he found Amy installed as housekeeper. She was now Mrs. Orton, for her lover returned as soon as ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe


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