halting

1. 1
   verb

   Present participle and gerund of halt.

   The council is halting all new construction until the review is complete.

   Halting the negotiations now would damage both sides.

   Note

   Here the word is pure verb. It follows be in the progressive (the council is halting construction) and stands in noun positions as a gerund (halting the talks would hurt both sides). Behind it lies an older verb, now obsolete, that meant to limp, to hesitate, to falter, or to be defective in verse. That ancestry is still audible in the "hesitant" adjective.

2. 2
   adjective

   Marked by frequent pauses or breaks; hesitant and not smooth or fluent.

   Like a conversation over a bad phone line that breaks up every few words.

   The witness offered a halting account of the accident, pausing to collect herself.

   His halting steps across the icy path showed how unsure he was.

   Similarhesitant, faltering, unsteady, broken

   Oppositefluent, smooth, steady, confident

   Note

   Speech and gait are its two natural homes: halting speech, halting steps. With a language it takes an article. In Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912), a guide has learned "to speak a halting English," and the article turns the language into one particular, imperfect version of it. The older limping verb behind the word is told at the participle.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The act of stopping, or a moment of hesitation in movement or progress.

   Like the pause a clock makes when its second hand sticks.

   The unexpected halting of negotiations frustrated both delegations.

   After a moment's halting, she continued reading the letter aloud.

   Similarsuspension, stopping, cessation, hesitation

   Oppositeresumption, continuation

   Note

   A noun that readily takes a plural, and one that devotional prose liked to set beside other failings. George Mogridge in 1841 laments "the faintings, the haltings, the back-slidings of Christians." There each halting is a single lapse of resolve, counted like a stumble. In everyday use the singular, as in a halting of negotiations, usually means a stop rather than a falter.

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