Definition of "stop"

stop¹

/stɒp/

verb
third-person singular simple present stops, present participle stopping, simple past and past participle stopped
1. (intransitive) To cease moving.
2. (intransitive) Not to continue.
  Quotations
  Then everybody once more knelt, and soon the blessing was pronounced. The choir and the clergy trooped out slowly, […] , down the nave to the western door. […] At a seemingly immense distance the surpliced group stopped to say the last prayer.
  1918, W[illiam] B[abington] Maxwell, chapter V, in The Mirror and the Lamp, Indianapolis, Ind.: The Bobbs-Merrill Company
3. (transitive) To cause (something) to cease moving or progressing.
  Quotations
  A “moving platform” scheme […] is more technologically ambitious than maglev trains even though it relies on conventional rails. […] This set-up solves several problems […]. Stopping high-speed trains wastes energy and time, so why not simply slow them down enough for a moving platform to pull alongside?
  2013 June 1, “Ideas coming down the track”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8838, page 13 (Technology Quarterly)
4. (transitive) To cease; to no longer continue (doing something).
5. (transitive) To cause (something) to come to an end.
6. (causative, transitive, chiefly UK) To end someone else's activity.
  Quotations
  When they have finished the milk they must be patted and squeezed to stop them exploding.
  1988, Jeanne Willis, Tony Ross, Dr Xargle's Book of Earthlets
7. (transitive) To close or block an opening.
8. (transitive, intransitive, photography, often with "up" or "down") To adjust the aperture of a camera lens.
9. (intransitive) To stay; to spend a short time; to reside or tarry temporarily.
  Quotations
  by stopping at home till the money was gone
  1887, R. D. Blackmore, Springhaven
  She’s not going away. She’s going to stop here forever.
  1931, E. F. Benson, chapter 7, in Mapp & Lucia‎
10. (music) To regulate the sounds of (musical strings, etc.) by pressing them against the fingerboard with the finger, or otherwise shortening the vibrating part.
11. (obsolete) To punctuate.
  Quotations
  if his sentences were properly stopped
  1828, Walter Savage Landor, “Alfieri and Salomon the Florentine Jew”, in Imaginary Conversations of Literary Men and Statesmen, volume III, London: Henry Colburn, […]
12. (nautical) To make fast; to stopper.
13. (phonetics, transitive) To pronounce (a phoneme) as a stop.
14. (finance, transitive) To delay the purchase or sale of (a stock) while agreeing the price for later.
  Quotations
  It will be noted that the specialist would have refused to stop the stock for broker X if he (the specialist) had only one order to sell at 85.
  1952, Charles Amos Dice, Wilford John Eiteman, The Stock Market, page 144
noun
plural stops
1. A (usually marked) place where buses, trams or trains halt to let passengers get on and off, usually smaller than a station.
2. An action of stopping; interruption of travel.
  Quotations
  It is […] doubtful […] whether it contributed anything to the stop of the infection.
  1722, Daniel Defoe, Journal of the Plague Year
  Occult qualities put a stop to the improvement of natural philosophy.
  1704, I[saac] N[ewton], “(please specify |book=1 to 3)”, in Opticks: Or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light. […], London: […] Sam[uel] Smith, and Benj[amin] Walford, printers to the Royal Society, […]
  It is a great step toward the mastery of our desires to give this stop to them.
  1693, [John Locke], “§107”, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education, London: […] A[wnsham] and J[ohn] Churchill, […]
3. That which stops, impedes, or obstructs; an obstacle; an impediment.
  Quotations
  A fatal stop trauerst their headlong course
  1595, Samuel Daniel, “(please specify the folio number)”, in The First Fowre Bookes of the Ciuile Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and Yorke, London: […] P[eter] Short for Simon Waterson
  So melancholy a prospect should inspire us with zeal to oppose some stop to the rising torrent.
  a. 1729, John Rogers, The Advantages of conversing with good Men
4. A device intended to block the path of a moving object
  1. (engineering) A device, or piece, as a pin, block, pawl, etc., for arresting or limiting motion, or for determining the position to which another part shall be brought.
  2. (architecture) A member, plain or moulded, formed of a separate piece and fixed to a jamb, against which a door or window shuts.
5. (linguistics) A consonant sound in which the passage of air is temporarily blocked by the lips, tongue, or glottis.
6. A symbol used for purposes of punctuation and representing a pause or separating clauses, particularly a full stop, comma, colon or semicolon.
7. (music) A knob or pin used to regulate the flow of air in an organ.
8. (music) One of the vent-holes in a wind instrument, or the place on the wire of a stringed instrument, by the stopping or pressing of which certain notes are produced.
9. (tennis) A very short shot which touches the ground close behind the net and is intended to bounce as little as possible.
10. (soccer) A save; preventing the opposition from scoring a goal
  Quotations
  The Foxes were indebted to two crucial saves from keeper Kasper Schmeichel, who turned former Leicester defender Ben Chilwell's header on to a post then produced an even better stop to turn Mason Mount's powerful shot wide.
  2021 May 15, Phil McNulty, “Chelsea 0-1 Leicester”, in BBC Sport‎
11. (zoology) The depression in a dog’s face between the skull and the nasal bones.
12. (photography) A part of a photographic system that reduces the amount of light.
13. (photography) A unit of exposure corresponding to a doubling of the brightness of an image.
14. (photography) An f-stop.
15. The diaphragm used in optical instruments to cut off the marginal portions of a beam of light passing through lenses.
16. (fencing) A coup d'arret, or stop thrust.
punctuation mark
1. Used to indicate the end of a sentence in a telegram.

stop²

/stɒp/

noun
plural stops
1. (UK dialectal) A small well-bucket; a milk-pail.

stop³

/stɒp/

noun
plural stops
1. (physics) The squark that is the superpartner of a top quark.
  Quotations
  For neutralino masses below approximately 700 GeV, gluino masses of less than 1.78 TeV and 1.76 TeV are excluded at the 95% CL in simplified models of the pair production of gluinos decaying via sbottom and stop, respectively.
  2016, ATLAS Collaboration, “Search for pair production of gluinos decaying via stop and sbottom in events with b {\displaystyle b} -jets and large missing transverse momentum in p p {\displaystyle pp} collisions at s = 13 {\displaystyle {\sqrt {s}}=13} TeV with the ATLAS detector”, in arXiv‎

Definition of "stop"

stop1

verb

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noun

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punctuation mark

stop2

noun

stop3

noun

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stop¹

stop²

stop³