the.com/breakdown
When a thing stops working, or you do, and both feel oddly similar.
means A collapse — of a machine, a system, or a person — into component parts or nonfunction, and also the act of taking something apart piece by piece to understand it.
from Straightforward English compound, break + down, dating to the 1800s, when it first described mechanical failure — an engine or a system literally breaking down into pieces or uselessness. The sense expanded to statistics and processes (a 'breakdown of costs') and, by the later 1800s, to human nervous collapse — the mind borrowing the machine's vocabulary for its own failures.
- nervous breakdown
- not a real clinical diagnosis, just common usage
- dance meaning
- breakdancing's break is the instrumental drum solo
- financial sense
- itemizing costs, the opposite of collapsing
- first recorded use
- 1832, describing failed machinery, not feelings