Breaker
intj, noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 1 Something that breaks (something else).
"a breaker of men's souls"
- 2 A small cask of liquid kept permanently in a ship’s boat in case of shipwreck.
"Then the conversation broke off, and there was little more talking, only a noise of men going backwards and forwards, and of putting down of kegs and the hollow gurgle of good liquor being poured from breakers into the casks."
- 3 a device that trips like a switch and opens the circuit when overloaded wordnet
- 4 A machine for breaking rocks, or for breaking coal at the mines.
- 5 waves breaking on the shore wordnet
Show 9 more definitions
- 6 The building in which such a machine is placed.
"at the coal breaker"
- 7 a quarry worker who splits off blocks of stone wordnet
- 8 A person or company that specializes in breaking things; their yard.; Ellipsis of shipbreaker, a shipbreaking company or its yard. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis, often, plural
- 9 A person or company that specializes in breaking things; their yard.; Ellipsis of car breaker, a car breaking company or its yard. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis, often, plural
- 10 A person or company that specializes in breaking things; their yard.; Ellipsis of horsebreaker. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis, often, plural
"A hasty and passionate breaker will often make a really goodtempered young horse an inveterate gibber"
- 11 A wave breaking into foam against the shore, or against a sandbank, or a rock or reef near the surface, considered a useful warning to ships of an underwater hazard in-plural
"Now and then in the lagoon you hear the leaping of a fish[…]. And above all, ceaseless like time, is the dull roar of the breakers on the reef."
- 12 A breakdancer. colloquial
- 13 A user of CB radio. US, dated
"Their radios had been blocked by a breaker calling himself Yankee Bucket Mouth."
- 14 Ellipsis of circuit breaker. abbreviation, alt-of, ellipsis
"breaker panel"
- 1 Used to open a conversation or call for a response on CB radio. US, dated
"breaker one nine"
Example
More examples"You just need to reset the breaker. Hurry up!"
Etymology
From Middle English breker, brekere, equivalent to break + -er. Cognate with Dutch breker, German Low German Breker, German Brecher.
Probably from Spanish barrica (“barrel”). Doublet of barrique.
Related phrases
More for "breaker"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.