abort

/əˈbɔrt/

/əˈbɔt/

Other forms: aborted; aborting; aborts

To abort something is to end it. When something is aborted, it's finished.

In a movie, you may have seen people on some kind of mission yelling "Abort! Abort!" That means "Stop!" When you abort a plan or activity, you're ending it, usually prematurely. If you abort a dinner, you cancel it in the middle. If the police abort a raid, they stop it after it has already begun. A writer could abort a novel after writing a chapter or two. You can't abort something that hasn't been started: that's more like canceling or postponing.

Definitions of abort

1. verb

   terminate before completion
   “abort the mission”

   “abort the process running on my computer”

   type of:

   end, terminate

   bring to an end or halt
2. verb

   terminate a pregnancy by undergoing an abortion
   types:

   miscarry

   suffer a miscarriage

   type of:

   discharge, eject, exhaust, expel, release

   eliminate (a substance)
3. verb

   cease development, die, and be aborted
   type of:

   buy the farm, cash in one's chips, choke, conk, croak, decease, die, drop dead, exit, expire, give-up the ghost, go, kick the bucket, pass, pass away, perish, pop off, snuff it

   pass from physical life and lose all bodily attributes and functions necessary to sustain life
4. noun

   the act of terminating a project or procedure before it is completed
   “I wasted a year of my life working on an abort”

   “he sent a short message requesting an abort due to extreme winds in the area”

   type of:

   conclusion, ending, termination

   the act of ending something