brake
Pluralbrakes
Often confused with break
Pluralbrakes
- 1A device that slows or stops the motion of a wheel or vehicle, usually by friction; also the controls used to engage it, such as a car's pedal.
He slammed on the brake when the light turned red.
The mechanic replaced the worn brakes before the long trip.
Oppositeaccelerator
Note
The everyday sense, the one a driver means. Its origin is uncertain: it may come from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German brake, meaning a nose ring, a curb or a flax brake, from a Germanic root meaning "to break." In speech the plural dominates, so you slam the brakes or press the brakes. Spelling is all that separates it from break, which sounds identical.
- 2To operate a brake or brakes in order to slow down or stop.
The driver braked hard to avoid the cyclist.
Always brake before entering a sharp turn.
Similarslow, decelerate, stop
Oppositeaccelerate
Note
The verb is regular, and that is where writers slip: the past is braked and the present participle is braking. Because brake and break sound alike, it is easy to write broke where braked is meant. The driver braked; the window broke. The old past tense brake belongs to break, not to this verb; see the archaic past of break.
- 3The action of applying a brake to slow down a machine or vehicle.
A gentle brake brought the train smoothly into the station.
Her sudden brake left skid marks on the road.
- 4Anything that serves to slow down or stop an action, process, or trend.
Rising interest rates put a brake on the housing market.
Bureaucracy often acts as a brake on innovation.
Similarcurb, check, restraint, damper, drag
Note
The machine turned into metaphor: whatever holds back a process can be called a brake on it, whether the process is spending, growth or reform. The usual construction is a brake on something. Keep the spelling straight, because the sound invites a slip. A break in a process is a pause or a rupture, while a brake on it is a restraint that slows it.
- 5To slow down or come to a stop as though a brake had been applied.
The runaway trolley finally braked against the sandy embankment.
Spacecraft brake using the friction of the atmosphere.
Similarslow, decelerate, stop, halt
Oppositeaccelerate
Note
Here the subject is the thing that slows, not a person working a pedal. With the operating verb, a driver brakes. In this use a trolley, a spacecraft or anything else in motion brakes by itself. The "as if" allows the slowing force to be something other than a brake at all, such as sand, air or friction.
- 6A large, coarse fern (Pteridium species), commonly known as bracken, that grows in open ground and woodland.
Sheep grazed near the brake on the open moor.
By late summer the brake had turned brown and brittle.
Similarbracken
Note
Here the clipped word returns to the plant it was clipped from: bracken, of the genus Pteridium. Botanists keep Pteridium apart from Pteris, the genus covered by the Pteris fern, but the one name stretches over both. Like bracken itself, it is often a mass noun, as in a hillside of brake.
- 7A fern of the genus Pteris, a group that includes many ornamental and table ferns.
Florists often use brake in mixed foliage arrangements.
A delicate brake unfurled new fronds along the shaded path.
Note
A clipped word: apparently bracken cut short, the way chick comes from chicken. It is a separate word from the stopping device and shares only its spelling. It works as both a countable and an uncountable noun. A brake is a single fern; brake, with no article, is a mass of them.
- 8A thicket, or an area overgrown with briers, brambles, and other tangled growth.
The fox vanished into a brake of thorns and bramble.
We pushed through the brake to reach the riverbank.
Similarthicket, brush, undergrowth, scrub
Note
The poets' thicket, from Old English *bracu, found in fearnbraca, "thickets of fern." That origin is why ferns and brakes keep company. Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis (1593) has "brakes obscure and rough," Wordsworth (1807) "a brake of fern," and Walter Scott (1808) a rider who "stayed not for brake." George Meredith (1859) spells it break, a reminder that the two words have long been confused.
- 9A machine used to bend or fold sheet metal along straight lines.
The shop bought a new brake to fold ductwork panels.
She clamped the aluminum in the brake before forming the bend.
Note
The metalworker's brake belongs to a separate family: Late Middle English, from Middle Low German brake and Dutch braak. It shares that source with the tools that crush flax and break up clods. Whether this family is related to the stopping device is uncertain. In a workshop the word is about bending, not slowing, so "put it in the brake" means shaping sheet stock.
- 10A large, heavy harrow dragged across plowed ground to break up clods of earth; a drag.
They pulled the brake across the field to ready the soil for seeding.
An ox team hauled the brake over the freshly plowed acres.
Note
A farmer's word, and a good example of how literal this family is: the brake breaks the clods. Drag is its synonym in farm use. It also has a matching verb, to brake a field, meaning to pulverize the soil with this harrow.
- 11A large open carriage used to carry shooting parties and their equipment to the field.
The estate's brake clattered down the lane toward the grouse moor.
They loaded guns and game bags onto the brake at dawn.
Note
A carriage that outlived its horses. In the American novelist Winston Churchill's The Celebrity (1897), Mr. Cooke drives guests over the Rise in his new brake, a horse-drawn vehicle. In Terrance Dicks's Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (1976), a muddy shooting brake announces itself with the sound of an engine. Through the compound shooting brake, the name passed to the motor car.
- 12An apparatus for testing the power of an engine or motor by measuring the friction it can overcome; a friction brake.
The lab used a brake to determine the steam engine's output.
Readings from the brake showed that the motor's power had declined.
Similardynamometer
Note
An engineer's measuring instrument rather than a stopping device. The motor works against friction, and that friction is weighed to give the motor's power. Engineers also call it a friction brake. It shares a mechanism with the vehicle brake but not a purpose: here the resistance is applied in order to be measured, not to bring anything to a halt.
- 13The part of a carriage, such as a movable gun battery or engine, that enables it to turn.
The crew relied on the brake to wheel the field gun around.
A worn brake made the heavy carriage hard to steer.
- 14A pen or enclosure used to hold cattle, horses, or similar animals and keep them still.
The drovers herded the cattle into the brake for the night.
A wooden brake at the edge of the field kept the bullocks penned.
Similarpen, enclosure, corral, pound
Note
The enclosure sense turns up in an unexpected compound. The Illustrated London News of 1868 reports a cockfighting ring in a field that "verged on the shooting-brake where the rabbits were." That shooting-brake is a piece of ground holding game, not a vehicle. Do not confuse it with the shooting party's carriage, whose name looks exactly the same.
- 15A sturdy frame used to hold an unruly horse in place while a blacksmith shoes it.
The farrier guided the restless stallion into the brake before lifting its hoof.
A well-built brake let the smith work safely on even the wildest colt.
Note
One of a cluster of meanings built on restraint rather than slowing: frames, pens and carts for holding or managing animals all share this name. The shoeing frame also goes by trave, a synonym worth knowing when reading about smiths and farriers. It belongs in the same cluster as the cattle pen.
- 16A skeleton cart or carriage without a body, used for training horses to pull.
Each morning the groom harnessed an unbroken colt to the brake for its first lesson.
The stable kept a light brake for accustoming young horses to the harness.
- 17The lever or handle worked by hand to operate a pump.
Two sailors heaved on the brake to clear the bilge.
She worked the brake steadily until water gushed from the spout.
Note
A sailor's word, used chiefly at sea. Aboard ship the lever that works the pump is its brake, and swipe is another name for the same handle. Away from a maritime setting the word would be misread as a stopping device, so it is worth setting the scene, at the pump or on deck, when you use it. On land, pump handle does the job plainly.
- 18A trough in which a baker kneads and works bread dough.
Before dawn the baker leaned over the brake, working the heavy dough by hand.
Each batch of bread started in the wooden brake at the back of the shop.
Similartrough
Note
A baker's tool from early modern kitchens. Gervase Markham's Cavalarice the English Horseman (1617) sets out the order of work: knead first with the hands, and lastly with the brake. The sense sits close to the verb meaning "to knead", and the two make a natural pair: the trough where dough is worked, and the act of working it.
- 19A tool used to crush and break the woody stalks of flax or hemp so the fibers can be separated.
Workers fed bundles of retted hemp into the brake to loosen the fiber.
After drying, the flax went to the brake, where its woody stalks were crushed.
Note
A textile worker's tool for the first, rough stage of turning flax or hemp into usable fiber: the retted stalks are crushed so the woody core falls away from the long fibers. One breaks flax on a brake, so the tool is named for the very action it performs. It reached late Middle English from Middle Low German brake (compare Dutch braak), and cataract is an alternative name for it.
- 20To bruise and crush something, or to knead it.
The millers brake the seeds to release their oil.
She would brake the boiled roots into a smooth paste.
Similarcrush, pound, mash, knead, bruise
Note
The farmer's son brakes the flax while his mother brakes the bread dough. One verb covers both the crushing of fiber and the kneading of dough, because each means working a material by pressure. The kneading side pairs with the baker's kneading trough. The verb always takes an object, and its past is braked.
- 21
- 22An ancient war engine similar to a crossbow or ballista, used to hurl projectiles.
The defenders wheeled a brake onto the rampart and loosed a great bolt at the advancing line.
Ancient armies relied on the brake to batter enemy walls from a distance.
Note
A word from the history of siege warfare. It groups this machine with the crossbow and the ballista, engines that threw missiles by mechanical force rather than by the strength of an arm. Readers meet it in military history, where the context of battle and siege keeps it from being mistaken for a stopping device. The same field gives the crossbow's winch.
- 23The winch used to draw back and tension the string of a crossbow.
The crossbowman cranked the brake until the string locked into the catch.
Without a brake, no soldier could draw so stiff a bow by hand.
Note
A piece of armorer's vocabulary that has dropped out of use. Because it is obsolete, it belongs in historical description or in fiction set among crossbowmen. In modern technical writing it would simply be read as the stopping device. It sits naturally beside the ancient war engine, the larger machine of the same military family.
- 24An enclosure or cage used to confine a person or animal.
Note
Long out of use, and of uncertain origin, so it cannot be tied to the stopping device, the ferns or the crushing tools. It turns up only in older writing, and a reader meeting it there should not expect a mechanism; it means simply an enclosure. In modern prose, cage says the same thing without confusion.
- 25An instrument formerly used to inflict pain as torture or punishment.
The accused was strapped to the brake until he named his accomplices.
Methods of applying pain were many and ingenious, in particular the ways of twisting, stretching and manipulating the body out of shape, normally falling under the catch-all term of the rack, or the brakes.
2011, Thomas Penn, Winter KingSimilarrack
Note
A historians' word now, used of the torture of earlier times. Thomas Penn's Winter King (2011) puts it in the plural beside the rack, as a catch-all for devices that twisted and stretched the body: "the rack, or the brakes." It shares an uncertain origin with the obsolete word for a cage.
- 26Past tense of break. Archaic: the modern form is broke.
Note
The King James Bible of 1611 still reaches for this form: "all the people brake off the golden earrings," where modern English says broke. Outside older texts, scripture and poetry it reads as deliberate antiquing, so use it only for that effect. Keep it apart from the verb of slowing down, which is regular. A driver braked, but a seal that was snapped open in the old style brake.
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Practice
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Origins
The origin is uncertain, but it possibly comes from Middle Dutch or Middle Low German 'brake' ("nose ring, curb, flax brake"), which according to Watkins is related to sense 4 and goes back to Proto-Germanic *brekaną ("to break").
It is apparently a shortened form of 'bracken', much as 'chick' relates to 'chicken'.
From Old English *bracu, attested in the plural compound 'fearnbraca' ("thickets of fern"), probably from Proto-Germanic *brekaną ("to break") and influenced by the "fern" sense. Compare Middle Low German 'brake' ("stump, branch").
Late Middle English, from Middle Low German 'brake', Dutch 'braak', and Old Dutch 'braeke'; possibly related to sense 1.