Definitions
from The Century Dictionary.
- Brokenly; by breaking or being broken off suddenly: as, the path or the discourse ended abruptly.
- Precipitously, or with a very steep slope: as, the rocks rise abruptly from the water's edge.
- Suddenly, without giving notice, or without the usual forms: as, the minister left France abruptly.
- With an abrupt termination.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adverb In an abrupt manner; without giving notice, or without the usual forms; suddenly.
- adverb Precipitously.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- adverb quickly and without warning
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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Mellon, who sued her mother for £5m in a dispute over Jimmy Choo shares after her father Tom's death in 2004, left the label abruptly in November last year.
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J.nnifer Lopez's split from Sony Music isn't quite as amicable as she wants you to think: evidently the label abruptly dropped J. Lo because of recent flops.
Crushable Crushable Staff 2010
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J.nnifer Lopez's split from Sony Music isn't quite as amicable as she wants you to think: evidently the label abruptly dropped J. Lo because of recent flops.
Crushable Crushable Staff 2010
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But should either term abruptly gain attention in the media, Mr. Usman might refrain from bidding until the issue dies down.
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See also the Sages who noted that the Hebrews had sunken to the lowest levels of the sexually and morally depraved Egyptian culture — having entered “49 of the 50 gates of impurity”, and that the reason they were taken out so abruptly is the danger that had they remained any longer, they would have sunken past the level of being able to be redeemend — as indeed 80% of them already had (seeRashi).
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Not until Mister Haggin abruptly picked him up under one arm and stepped into the sternsheets of the waiting whaleboat, did Jerry dream that anything untoward was to happen to him.
Chapter 1 2010
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A part of the landscape is an interesting phenomenon; in amongst the endless fields, you will find the occasional lonely hill, rising abruptly from the earth and coming to a broad flat top ... utterly alien in that flat land, and upon reflection, very hard to explain.
Archive 2010-04-01 Big Jim 2010
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An automobile, darting out from a cross-street, caused the driver of the wagon to pull in abruptly and apply the brake.
CHAPTER XXIII 2010
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Supposedly because he resigned abruptly from the shadowy government outfit he worked for, and The Powers That Be wanted to know why.
Archive 2009-11-01 2009
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Then, as presiding officer, Cardin abruptly declared the Senate in recess until 11 a.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 5.
Call the Senate's bluff on recess appointments Steven G. Bradbury 2010
bilby commented on the word abruptly
"Nature's biggest, most important problems take the longest to solve satisfactorily because they can be solved only by lessons humanly learned through trial-and-error mistake-making; and, most important, by those who make the mistakes and their self-recognition and public acknowledgment of their errors and their only-thereby-learned-from positive clues to effective solutions of evolutionary problems in the present instance, the problem of how best to abruptly terminate further atomic energy development for human use as fissionally or fusionally generated aboard planet Earth."
- Buckminster Fuller, 'Guinea Pig B'.
A man with some wonderful ideas, Mr Fuller. But I wonder how anyone ever understood what they were.
February 21, 2009