Willa CatherJ. G. Colton
Did you know?
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.
Examples of hiatus in a Sentence
Stephanie Wenger, People.com, 3 June 2025
Giudice, now 24, spent the next 15 years being filmed for The Real Housewives of New Jersey, which starred her mother, Teresa Giudice, before being put on hiatus in 2024.
—Stephanie McNeal, Glamour, 3 June 2025
Trade frictions between Washington and Beijing have flared up after a hiatus following a meeting between U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and his Chinese counterpart He Lifeng in Geneva, Switzerland, that had led them to suspend most tariffs for 90 days.
—Anniek Bao, CNBC, 2 June 2025
Pulp’s celebrity became uncomfortable for Cocker in the late nineties, and the band went on hiatus in 2002.
—Sarah Larson, New Yorker, 1 June 2025
See All Example Sentences for hiatus
Cite this Entry
“Hiatus.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hiatus. Accessed 7 Jun. 2025.
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hiatus
noun
Medical Definition
hiatus
noun
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