Willa CatherJ. G. Colton
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This brief hiatus in your day is brought to you by, well, hiatus. While the word now most often refers to a temporary pause, hiatus originally referred to a physical opening in something, such as the mouth of a cave, or, as the 18th century British novelist Laurence Sterne would have it, a sartorial gap: in the wildly experimental novel Tristram Shandy, Sterne wrote of “the hiatus in Phutatorius’s breeches.” Hiatus comes from the Latin verb hiare, meaning “to open wide,” which makes it a distant relation of both yawn and chasm. And that’s all we have for now—you may resume your regular activities.
Synonyms
Examples of hiatus in a Sentence
Joseph Dycus, The Mercury News, 11 Apr. 2024
During the hiatus from the tour, a lawsuit accusing Steven Tyler of assaulting a model in the Seventies was dismissed by a New York judge.
—Andy Greene, Rolling Stone, 10 Apr. 2024
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These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'hiatus.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.
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“Hiatus.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hiatus. Accessed 16 Apr. 2024.
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hiatus
noun
Medical Definition
hiatus
noun
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