hiatus
noun

- a pause during which nothing happens, or a gap where something is missing.

- a pause or break in continuity; a gap in a series or sequence, making it incomplete; an interruption of activity or occurrence.

- an interruption in time or continuity; especially a period when something (such as a programme or activity) is suspended or interrupted.

Oxford English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, Collins English Dictionary

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WORD ORIGIN

English borrowed hiatus directly from Latin in the 1560s, where it already meant "opening, aperture, gap, rupture." The Latin source is the verb hiare — "to gape, to stand open wide" — which traces back to the Proto-Indo-European root hieh-, meaning "to yawn or gape."

That ancient root is surprisingly productive. It gave us not only hiatus but also — through different routes — the words yawn and chasm. In other words, every time you yawn, you're performing a tiny, involuntary hiatus of the mouth. Even chaos, originally meaning a vast void or abyss, belongs to the same extended family.

The earliest recorded English use is from 1563, in the writing of the theologian William Fulke, who used it in its original physical sense — a gap or opening in a material object. By the early 1600s the word had widened to cover gaps in time, narrative, or continuity. Laurence Sterne, in his gleefully chaotic novel "Tristram Shandy" (1759), used it for a literal gap in someone's clothing — "the hiatus in Phutatorius's breeches" — which tells you everything about Sterne's sense of humour.

In linguistics, hiatus has its own specialist meaning: the meeting of two vowel sounds at a syllable boundary with no consonant between them. Say “co-operate” or “naïve” slowly, and you'll feel the slight catch between the vowels — that's a hiatus.

Hiatus came into English fully formed from Latin, without needing any modification. Its plural, technically, can be either hiatus or hiatuses, and both are acceptable in modern English.

Helga & Paul Smith

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SYNONYMS

absence, adjournment, armistice, back burner (on the), breather, break, break in continuity, breathing space (spell), ceasefire, cessation, cold storage (on ice), comma in proceedings, cooling-off period, dead time, downtime, drawing breath, enforced break, gap, going quiet, grinding halt, half-time, HIATUS, holding pattern, holding period, idle spell, interim, interlude, intermission, interruption, interval, lacuna, lapse, layoff period, let-up, lull, marking time, moratorium, pause, pause for breath, pause in proceedings, period of inactivity, quiescence, recess, respite, rest, sabbatical, season break, shelf (on the), sitting out, standstill, standing down, standing pat, stay, step back, stop, stoppage, stopover (figurative), suspension, taking five, taking stock, temporary withdrawal, time off, time out, time to regroup, treading water, vacancy, waiting in the wings

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