pause
Pluralpauses
Pluralpauses
- 1A temporary stop or rest; a brief interruption or suspension of an action.
An awkward pause followed his announcement.
The talks resumed after a brief pause for lunch.
Similarrecess, hiatus, moratorium, caesura
- 2To take a brief rest or break, especially after a period of effort.
Runners often pause at the halfway mark to drink water.
The hikers paused beside the stream before tackling the final climb.
Note
The word's root idea is stopping, not resting. It comes through Middle French and Latin pausa, a doublet English also keeps, from Greek paúō, "stop". In this sense the stop follows effort: one pauses at the halfway mark or before the last climb. It takes no object; for halting something else, see the transitive "stop an activity" use.
- 3To stop an activity or process for a while.
The company paused production while engineers inspected the equipment.
Regulators can pause a trial if safety concerns arise.
Similarhalt, suspend, stop, interrupt
Note
Here the verb takes an object, and the object is a process: work, production, a trial. Chris Howe, writing in RAIL in 2025, observes that pausing work on a large construction site "is not straightforward." The point is that a paused activity is meant to resume, unlike one that has simply stopped. Compare the intransitive "stop and wait", where the subject itself halts.
- 4
- 5To interrupt an activity briefly and wait before going on.
She paused mid-sentence when the lights flickered.
Tour guides pause at each landmark so the group can catch up.
Similarstop, halt, break, wait
Note
Pausing here is a deliberate stillness, often staged for listeners. A storyteller pauses for effect, and a speaker pauses and takes a breath before a retort. The use is literary as well as everyday. Shakespeare's "Tarry, pause a day or two" and Milton's "pausing a while thus to herself she mused" both stretch the wait well beyond a breath.
- 6
- 7
- 8Hesitation or doubt; a state of uncertainty that makes someone hold back.
The contract's vague wording gave the lawyers pause.
She accepted the offer without a moment's pause.
Similarhesitation, wavering, vacillation
Note
A figurative use, in which the halt happens in the mind. Its home is two idioms: something gives you pause, or you take pause. Neither takes an article. Hamlet's "I stand in pause where I shall first begin" shows a freer, older construction. Mike Johnson, the US House speaker, spoke in 2025 of having "great pause," treating it like doubt, a quantity one can have more or less of.
- 9Alternative letter-case form of Pause.
He tapped pause on the remote before answering the phone.
The video kept playing because pause on the old controller sticks.
Note
The capital letter belongs to the label. Pause is the word printed on a key, a remote-control button or an on-screen control, and it is capitalized when quoted as that label. In running prose the button is usually lowercase, as in tap pause or hit pause. The action it performs is halting playback.
- 10A written mark showing where and how the voice should stop or rest in reading; a punctuation mark.
The proofreader inserted a pause where the long clause needed a breath.
Older grammar books ranked the pauses from the comma up to the period.
- 11A break in written text, such as a paragraph division.
The author put a pause between the two scenes so readers could absorb the shock.
Each pause in the chapter marks a jump forward in time.
Note
Here the pause is a division on the page rather than a silence in the voice. John Locke, writing on St. Paul's epistles, says Paul writes with a warmth that neglects "those Partitions and Pauses" observed by men trained by rhetoricians. Pauses in that sense are the planned breaks of a composed argument, paired naturally with partitions.
- 12A sign in music indicating that a note or rest is to be continued or held.
The choir held the final chord at the pause until the conductor's hands dropped.
A pause over the last rest lets the silence linger.
Similarfermata
Note
Music uses the word for a written sign rather than a silence. Placed over a note or a rest, the pause tells performers to hold it longer than written. A pause over a note therefore prolongs sound, the reverse of the everyday stop. Musicians speak of holding a chord at the pause, with the conductor deciding when it ends.
- 13Used immediately after a statement to signal that no sexual innuendo or homosexual meaning was intended, especially when the words could reasonably be heard that way.
"I spent all weekend at his house, pause," he said before anyone could comment.
"Honestly, I'd do anything for that man. Pause."
Note
A slang disclaimer that works by coming last. The speaker says something that might be heard as a sexual remark about another man, then adds the single word, much as others say no homo. The joke treats a gay reading as something to be denied. It belongs to casual talk among friends, is better recognized than used, and can easily offend elsewhere.
- 14To consider or reflect; to weigh a matter in the mind.
Note
A Shakespearean sense, now obsolete, in which to pause was to stop and think. The line "Take time to pause" in A Midsummer Night's Dream means "take time to consider." Modern readers hear only a halt, so it is easily misread. Use reflect or consider instead. The thoughtful hesitation survives in the "give pause" idiom.
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Practice
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Origin
This word came through Middle French pause from Latin pausa, which in turn came from Ancient Greek paûsis, from the verb paúō ("stop"), of uncertain origin.