interrupt

Formsinterrupts, interrupting, interrupted

Pluralinterrupts

1. 1
   verbtransitive or intransitive

   To disturb or halt an ongoing action or process, or the person carrying it out, by suddenly breaking in, especially by speaking.

   A fire alarm interrupted the lecture halfway through.

   It's considered rude to interrupt while someone else is speaking.

   Similardisrupt, disturb, halt, suspend, interject

   Oppositeresume, continue

   Note

   Breaking in between is the literal picture: Latin inter, "between", and rumpere, "to break", passed into Middle English as interrupten. The verb works with or without an object, so you can interrupt the speaker, interrupt the debate, or simply interrupt. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet names both the person and the activity at once: "Do not interrupt me in my course."

2. 2
   verbtransitive

   To divide or separate something, or to break the monotony of an otherwise uniform expanse or sequence.

   Narrow canals interrupt the city, separating one island district from the next.

   The long stretch of desert was interrupted only by an occasional gas station.

   Similarbreak, punctuate, divide, separate, intersect

   Note

   Here nothing is stopped and no one is annoyed. A surface or a sequence is simply broken into parts, which sits closest to the Latin "break apart" behind the everyday breaking-in meaning. The sense is at home in the passive, usually with by: the road was not interrupted by a single hill, and the plain was interrupted only by a line of trees.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   An event or signal that causes a computer or other device to temporarily stop what it is doing and attend to a particular condition.

   The operating system handles each interrupt before returning control to the running program.

   Hardware interrupts from the disk controller signal that a data transfer is complete.

   Note

   Engineers use this word for the signal itself, in electronics as well as computing. When an interrupt arrives, the processor sets aside its current work, saves where it was, runs a short handler routine for the condition, and then resumes. The noun counts freely, as in hardware interrupts or interrupts from the disk controller, and the usual verb with it is handle.

4. 4
   verbtransitive

   To signal to a computer that an exceptional condition has occurred and must be handled.

   The keyboard controller interrupts the CPU each time a key is pressed.

   A failing sensor will interrupt the flight computer so the fault can be handled at once.

   Note

   Computing kept the everyday grammar of breaking in on someone. The device raising the signal is the subject and the processor is the object, so a packet receiver circuit interrupts the microprocessor, and the keyboard controller interrupts the CPU. The verb always takes an object here, because there is always a processor being called away from its work.

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