What is the origin of the term Breaking news?
Get thee to General Questions and ye shall then know.
sorry bout that, didn’t even notice.
Moderator’s Note: Moving from GD to GQ.
The dictionary isn’t much help on this one; listing quite a number of different uses for the word break, but I would suggest that the usage here is related to the concept of ‘Break of day’ (i.e. sunrise) - the sun ‘breaks’ in or intrudes, likewise the news intrudes (breaks in) upon the routine.
The Merriam-Webster Unabridged has a pretty extensive set of definitions for the “break” (as a verb). The relevant ones seem to be (as a transitive verb):
with the most relevant I think being 8 b and d.
As an intransitive verb, there is:
There seems to be a metaphor here of something breaking loose or breaking forth; other senses for intransitive verb 1 including everything from “breaking out of jail” to “the fish are breaking today” (leaping out of the surface of the water). A “breaking” news story is one which has just emerged or is just emerging into public view or attention.
Jeez! You just scared the HELL outta me with that post title! :eek::smack:
This was the first question I asked in GQ (not sdo long ago actually) and I got the same answers. It was slightly disappointing somehow. I like my etomologies full of all sorts of ‘folkesy’ stuff
Well, back in the Olden Days, the Town Criers used to carry wooden boards with the day’s headlines written on them (“Mongols Invade”; “Pope Launches Operation ‘Holy Land Freedom’”; “Everyone Dies from the Black Death”; etc). When the Town Criers heard a new story, they’d break their old boards and paint up new ones with the new story–hence the term “breaking news”. The practice was dropped when it was realized that almost no one at the time could read, including most of the Town Criers, making the whole process pretty useless.
NOTE: The preceding was made up for Carl_A_Norris’ benefit. I just made it up on the spot and it is completely bogus. Please do not spam it all over the Internet to the point that Snopes has to write up a web page for it.
Moderator’s Note: I also edited the thread title slightly so that Ranchoth and other people will not have a heart attack when the thread pops back up to the top of GQ and think the Martians must have landed or they’ve come out with the Segway Mark II or Cecil Adams has publicly announced his conversion to Scientology or anything like that.
Thanks for the effort MEBuckner. That is exactly the kind of stuff i like to see in an etymology 