HIATUS • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Hiatus

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/haɪˈeɪtəs/ Listen

Hiatus

noun

(pl. L. hiatus, E. hiatuses)

An interruption in the intensity or amount of something. Synonyms: abatement, reprieve, respite, suspension.

A missing piece (as a gap in a manuscript).

A natural opening or perforation through a bone or a membranous structure. Synonym: foramen.

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Etymology of 'Hiatus'

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hiatus hernia

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"Hiatus" Quotes from Famous Books

... style goes deeper 'than dull fools suppose.' When Comte took pains to prevent any sentence from exceeding two lines of his manuscript or five of print; to restrict every paragraph to seven sentences; to exclude every hiatus between two sentences, or even between two paragraphs; and never to reproduce any word, except the auxiliary monosyllables, in two consecutive sentences; he justified his literary solicitude by insisting on the wholesomeness ...

— Critical Miscellanies, Volume I (of 3) - Essay 4: Macaulay • John Morley

... done. I fear this time you will not be amongst the old rocks; how I shall rejoice to live to see you publish and discover another stage below the Silurian—it would be the grandest step possible, I think. I am very glad to hear what progress Bunbury is making in fossil Botany; there is a fine hiatus for him to fill up in this country. I will certainly call on him this winter...From what little I saw of him, I can quite believe everything which ...

— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin

... imperfect. He did not talk German; or so obscurely—and, if he attempted to speak fast, so erroneously—that in his second sentence, when conversing with a German lady of rank, he contrived to assure her that in his humble opinion she was a ——. Hard it is to fill up the hiatus decorously; but, in fact, the word very coarsely expressed that she was no better than she should be. Which reminds us of a parallel misadventure to a German, whose colloquial English had been equally neglected. Having obtained an interview with an English ...

— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 57, No. 351, January 1845 • Various

... of French versification have not always been the same. The classical movement of the seventeenth century in its reforms proscribed certain things, like hiatus, overflow lines, mute e before the caesura, which had been current hitherto, and the Romanticists of this century have endeavored to give greater diversity and flexibility to verse-structure both by restoring some of these liberties and by introducing ...

— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield

Words linked to "Hiatus" : Monro's foramen, break, piece, subsidence, opening, remittal, foramen magnum, gap, hiatus hernia, remission, defervescence, foramen of Monro, respite, interventricular foramen, interruption