1
[ adjective ] (of waves) curling over and crashing into surf or spray

Examples

: "the breaking waves"

Used in print

(Helen Hooven Santmyer, "There Were Fences"...)

One looked down on a sea of leaves , a breaking wave of flower .

Related terms

break

2
[ noun ] the act of breaking something

Synonyms

break breakage

Examples

"the breakage was unavoidable"

Used in print

(Ralph B. Long. The Sentence and Its Parts: A...)

From the point_of_view of syntactic analysis the head word in the statement is the predicator has broken , and from the point_of_view of meaning it would seem that the trouble centers in the breaking ; but dominant stress will be assigned to broken only in rather exceptional versions of the sentence .

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