Read along with the three podcasts, or open the full dictionary entry for Break down for the definition, Arabic meaning, synonyms and example sentences.
Narrator: Today's entry is "break down" — a phrasal verb and noun, pronounced /breɪk daʊn/, with the stress on "break".
Narrator: Break down means to stop functioning, or, as a noun, a detailed division into smaller parts.
Narrator: In plain English, this phrase describes mechanical failure, and separately, careful analytical division.
Narrator: It combines "break", to separate, with "down", indicating collapse or thorough reduction.
Narrator: "Cost breakdown" describes a detailed list showing exactly where each part of a budget goes.
Narrator: It differs from "malfunction" by scope — break down often implies complete stopping, malfunction implies partial error.
Narrator: "Emotional breakdown" describes a person overwhelmed, temporarily unable to cope with pressure.
Narrator: Mechanics, finance, and psychology all frequently rely on "break down" as versatile vocabulary.
Narrator: So remember: break down marks failure or division — stopping completely, or splitting something into clear, smaller parts.
Speaker A: "Cost breakdown" and "emotional breakdown" always feel so different in tone. Is there really a shared meaning connecting them?
Speaker B: Genuinely, yes, a shared idea! BREAK DOWN combines "break", to separate, with "down", collapse or division, covering both a system failing completely, and an analysis dividing something clearly. Both involve a whole coming apart, one way or another.
Speaker A: So the underlying idea really does connect stopping completely and dividing something into clear parts?
Speaker B: Exactly — that shared idea of coming apart is precisely why break down covers both senses!
Speaker A: Example sentences?
Speaker B: "The car broke down on the motorway"; "here's the cost breakdown for the project"; "she had a breakdown after the deadline" — mechanical failure, financial detail, and emotional collapse.
Speaker A: Common mistakes?
Speaker B: As noun, one word — "breakdown"; as verb, two words — "the car will break down"!
Speaker A: Close relatives?
Speaker B: "Malfunction" the mechanical cousin, "analysis" the detailed twin, "collapse" the intense alternative. Break down keeps its versatile, revealing charm!
Speaker B: Let's use "break down" in AI prompts — useful for finance-app cost-breakdown features and error-monitoring system failure alerts.
Speaker A: So break down in a prompt could help build a finance app's cost breakdown, or an error-monitoring failure alert?
Speaker B: Right. For a finance app's cost-breakdown feature, you'd write:
Prompt: Break down this month's expenses by category, showing which category grew the most compared to last month.
Speaker A: Good — what about a monitoring system alerting engineers the moment a server process breaks down unexpectedly?
Speaker B: The error-monitoring prompt:
Prompt: Alert the on-call engineer the moment this process breaks down, including the last error logged before the crash.
Speaker A: A task-management tool breaking down a large project into smaller, assignable subtasks automatically?
Speaker B: The task-management prompt:
Prompt: Break down this large project into smaller subtasks, assigning each one a realistic estimated completion time.
Speaker A: One more?
Speaker B: The analytics-dashboard prompt:
Prompt: Break down website traffic by source, comparing organic search against paid ads over the last quarter.
Break down — meaning in Arabic & definition More B courses GL Dictionary