different between swell vs breaker

English

Pronunciation

• enPR: sw?l, IPA^(key): /sw?l/
• Rhymes: -?l

Etymology 1

From Middle English swellen, from Old English swellan (“to swell”), from Proto-Germanic *swellan? (“to swell”), of unknown origin. Cognate with Old Frisian swella, Low German swellen, Dutch zwellen (“to swell”), German schwellen (“to swell”), Swedish svälla (“to swell”), Icelandic svella. The adjective may derive from the noun.

Verb

swell (third-person singular simple present swells, present participle swelling, simple past swelled or swole or swoll, past participle swollen or swelled)

1. (intransitive) To become bigger, especially due to being engorged.
   • c. 1598, William Shakespeare, Henry V, Prologue,^[1]

     O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend

     The brightest heaven of invention,

     A kingdom for a stage, princes to act

     And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

   • 1914, P. C. Wren, Snake and Sword, London: Longmans, Green, Chapter 5, p. 78,^[2]

     “If you drinks a drop more, Miss Lucy, you’ll just go like my pore young sister goed, […] Pop she did not. She swole … swole and swole.”

     “You mean ‘swelled,’ Cookoo,” corrected Lucille […]

     “ […] I say she swole—and what is more she swole clean into a dropsy.”
2. (transitive) To cause to become bigger.
   • 1633, John Donne, “The Storme” in Poems, London: John Marriot, p. 57,^[3]

     Mildly it [the wind] kist our sailes, and, fresh, and sweet,

     As, to a stomack sterv’d, whose insides meete,

     Meate comes, it came; and swole our sailes, when wee

     So joyd, as Sara’ her swelling joy’d to see.

   • 1687, Francis Atterbury, An Answer to Some Considerations on the Spirit of Martin Luther and the Original of the Reformation, Oxford, p. 12,^[4]

     ’Tis low ebb sure with his Accuser, when such Peccadillos as these are put in to swell the Charge.

   • 2013 June 18, Simon Romero, "Protests Widen as Brazilians Chide Leaders," New York Times (retrieved 21 June 2013):

     After a harsh police crackdown last week fueled anger and swelled protests, President Dilma Rousseff, a former guerrilla who was imprisoned under the dictatorship and has now become the target of pointed criticism herself, tried to appease dissenters by embracing their cause on Tuesday.

3. (intransitive) To grow gradually in force or loudness.

4. (transitive) To cause to grow gradually in force or loudness.
   • 1880, Felix Leopold Oswald, Summerland Sketches (page 57)

     It commenced with a slow crescendo, so irresistibly lugubrious that two of our dogs at once raised their heads and swelled their voices into a responsive tremolo, which may have been heard and appreciated by their distant relatives.

5. (transitive) To raise to arrogance; to puff up; to inflate.

6. (intransitive) To be raised to arrogance.
   • c. 1598, William Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 5, Scene 1,^[6]

     Why, here he comes, swelling like a turkey-cock.

   • 1814, Walter Scott, Waverley, Edinburgh: James Ballantyne, Volume 3, Chapter 9, p. 111,^[7]

     […] you swell at the sight of tartan, as the bull is said to do at scarlet.

7. To be elated; to rise arrogantly.
   • 1662, John Dryden, To My Lord Chancellor Presented on New-Years-Day, London: Henry Herringman, p. 5,^[8]

     In all things else above our humble fate

     Your equal mind yet swells not into state,

     But like some mountain in those happy Isles

     Where in perpetual Spring young Nature smiles,

     Your greatnesse shows:

8. To be turgid, bombastic, or extravagant.

9. To protuberate; to bulge out.

Translations

Etymology 2

From Middle English swelle, from the verb swellen (modern swell).

Noun

swell (countable and uncountable, plural swells)

1. The act of swelling; increase in size.
2. A bulge or protuberance.
3. Increase of power in style, or of rhetorical force.
   • 1826, Walter Savage Landor, Imaginary Conversations, London: Henry Colburn, 2nd edition, Volume I, Conversation 6, p. 128,^[9]

     Concentrated are his arguments, select and distinct and orderly his topics, ready and unfastidious his expressions, popular his allusions, plain his illustrations, easy the swell and subsidence of his periods […]

4. A long series of ocean waves, generally produced by wind, and lasting after the wind has ceased.
   • 1883, Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island, ch. 24:

     There was a great, smooth swell upon the sea.

5. (music) A gradual crescendo followed by diminuendo.
6. (music) A device for controlling the volume of a pipe organ.
7. (music) A division in a pipe organ, usually the largest enclosed division.
8. A hillock or similar raised area of terrain.
   • 1909, Joseph A. Altsheler, The Last of the Chiefs, ch. 2:

     Off on the crest of a swell a moving figure was seen now and then. "Antelope," said the hunters.

9. (geology) An upward protrusion of strata from whose central region the beds dip quaquaversally at a low angle.
10. (informal, dated) A person who dresses in a fancy or elegant manner.
    • c. 1850, William Makepeace Thackeray, "The Kickleburys on the Rhine" in The Christmas Books of Mr. M. A. Titmarsh:

      It costs him no more to wear all his ornaments about his distinguished person than to leave them at home. If you can be a swell at a cheap rate, why not?

    • 1887, Horatio Alger, The Cash Boy, ch. 9:

      He was dressed in a flashy style, not unlike what is popularly denominated a swell.

11. (informal) A person of high social standing; an important person.
    • 1864, Anthony Trollope, The Small House at Allington, ch. 2:

      "I am not in Mr Crosbie's confidence. He is in the General Committee Office, I know; and, I believe, has pretty nearly the management of the whole of it."

      "I'll tell you what he is, Bell; Mr Crosbie is a swell." And Lilian Dale was right; Mr Crosbie was a swell.

    • 1900, Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood Chapter 14, p. 176,^[10]

      The only sensible man I came across was the cabman who drove me about. A broken-down swell he was, I fancy.

    • 1906, Gilbert Parker, The Trespasser, ch. 8:

      You buy a lot of Indian or halfbreed loafers with beaver-skins and rum, go to the Mount of the Burning Arrows, and these fellows dance round you and call you one of the lost race, the Mighty Men of the Kimash Hills. And they'll do that while the rum lasts. Meanwhile you get to think yourself a devil of a swell—you and the gods!

    • 1938, Graham Greene, Brighton Rock, New York: Vintage, 2002, Part Seven, Chapter 3, p. 209,^[11]

      ‘ […] Colleoni’s going to take over this place from you, and he’s got his lawyer. A man in London. A swell.’

12. The front brow of a saddle bow, connected in the tree by the two saddle bars to the cantle on the other end.

    Synonyms: pommel, fork

Synonyms

• (person dressed in a fancy or elegant manner): dandy, dude, toff
• (person of high social standing): toff

Derived terms

• ground swell, groundswell
• upswell
• wind swell

Translations

Etymology 3

From the noun "swell" (a person dressed in an elegant manner).

Adjective

swell (not generally comparable, comparative sweller, superlative swellest)

1. (dated) Fashionable, like a swell or dandy.
   • 1912, Popular Mechanics (page 20)

     We pay the express, $5 a day our new agents are making and wearing the swellest clothes besides; old agents after one season make twice as much.

2. (Canada, US, informal, dated) Excellent.
   • 1931, Dashiell Hammett, The Glass Key, New York: Vintage, 1972, Chapter 9, p. 176,^[12]

     Jeff swaggered over to Ned Beaumont, threw his left arm roughly around his shoulders, seized Ned Beaumont’s right hand with his right hand, and addressed the company jovially: “This is the swellest guy I ever skinned a knuckle on and I’ve skinned them on plenty.”

   • 1958, Robert A. Heinlein, Have Space Suit—Will Travel, New York: Ballantine Books, 1977, Chapter 1, p. 8,^[13]

     […] we’re league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday.

   • 2012, Ariel Levy, "The Space In Between", The New Yorker, 10 Sep 2012:

     Orgasms are swell, but they are not the remedy to every injustice.

Translations

Adverb

swell (not comparable)

1. (Canada, US, informal) Very well.
   • 1929, Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, Chapter 12,^[14]

     “That lousy ring wasn’t worth no grand. I did swell to get two centuries for it.”

   • 1966, Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, New York: Modern Library, 2013, Part 3, p. 251,^[15]

     “ […] Last August, when I left The Walls, I figured I had every chance to start new. I got a job in Olathe, lived with my family, and stayed home nights. I was doing swell—”

Translations

Anagrams

• Wells, wells

Middle English

Etymology 1

From Old English swellan.

Verb

swell

1. Alternative form of swellen

Etymology 2

From the verb swellen.

Adverb

swell

1. Alternative form of swelle

Portuguese

Etymology

Borrowed from English swell.

Noun

swell m (plural swells)

1. (surfing) swell (series of waves)

English

Etymology 1

From Middle English brekere, equivalent to break +? -er. Cognate with Dutch breker, German Brecher.

Pronunciation

• (UK) IPA^(key): /?b?e?k?/
• (US) enPR: br??k?r, IPA^(key): /?b?e?k?/
• Rhymes: -e?k?(r)

Noun

breaker (plural breakers)

1. Something that breaks.
2. A machine for breaking rocks, or for breaking coal at the mines
3. The building in which such a machine is placed.
4. A person who specializes in breaking things.
5. (chiefly in the plural) A wave breaking into foam against the shore, or against a sandbank, or a rock or reef near the surface, considered a useful warning to ships of an underwater hazard
   • 1925, Ezra Pound, Canto I:

     And then went down to the ship,

     Set keel to breakers, forth on the godly sea
6. (colloquial) A breakdancer.
7. (US, dated) A user of CB radio.
   • 2015, Dave Wise, Stuart Wise, Like A Summer With A Thousand Julys

     Their radios had been blocked by a breaker calling himself Yankee Bucket Mouth.

8. (primarily plural) Clipping of shipbreaker.
9. (electrical engineering) Clipping of circuit breaker.

10. A horsebreaker.
    • 1831-1850, William Youatt, On the Structure and the Diseases of the Horse

      A hasty and passionate breaker will often make a really goodtempered young horse an inveterate gibber

Synonyms

• (something that breaks): destroyer, wrecker
• (machine for breaking rocks or coal):
• (building containing such a machine):
• (wave):
• (breakdancer): B-boy (male), B-girl (female), breakdancer

Derived terms

Translations

Interjection

breaker

1. (US, dated) Used to open a conversation or call for a response on CB radio.

Etymology 2

Probably from Spanish barrica (“barrel”). Doublet of barrique.

Noun

breaker (plural breakers)

1. A small cask of liquid kept permanently in a ship's boat in case of shipwreck.
   • 1898, J. Meade Falkner, Moonfleet Chapter 4

     Then the conversation broke off, and there was little more talking, only a noise of men going backwards and forwards, and of putting down of kegs and the hollow gurgle of good liquor being poured from breakers into the casks.

Anagrams

• rebreak

French

Etymology 1

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /b??.kœ?/

Noun

breaker m (plural breakers)

1. circuit breaker

Synonyms

• disjoncteur

Etymology 2

Pronunciation

• IPA^(key): /b??.ke/

Verb

breaker

1. (tennis) To break (win a game when receiving)

Conjugation

Derived terms

• débreaker