breakneck
UK/ˈbɹeɪkˌnɛk/
More pronunciations (1)Fewer pronunciations
Australia/ˈbɹæɪkˌnek/
breakneck adjective: dangerously fast; hell-for-leather.
Adjective
breakneck (comparative more breakneck, superlative most breakneck)
- Dangerously fast; hell-for-leather.
- breakneck pace
- He came running around the corner at a breakneck pace and couldn't stop in time to avoid hitting the fruit stand.
Adverb
breakneck (not comparable)
- Dangerously fast.
- I ran breakneck another hundred yards.2009, Carlos Reid, Stalking the Warden, page 165
Noun
breakneck (plural breaknecks)
- A fall that breaks the neck.
- A dangerous steep place from which one could fall and be injured.
breakneck meaning in Malayalam and Kannada
breakneck in Malayalam
- extremely fast, rapid, speedy
- അതിവേഗമുള്ള, അത്യാപത്കരമായ, സാഹസികമായ, ജീവാപായകരമായ, അപായകരമാംവിധം വേഗത്തിലുള്ള, മരണപ്പാച്ചിൽ പാഞ്ഞുള്ള
breakneck in Kannada
- ಅಪಾಯಕಾರಿ, ಅಪಾಯಕರವಾದ
Examples of breakneck in a sentence
- Charting modern China's breakneck pace is a staple of Jia Zhangke's cinema.
- Residential and industrial complexes are being built at breakneck speed.
- The fact is that Reaganomics slowed down the breakneck economy and succeeded in defeating public enemy number one, runaway inflation.
Forms of breakneck
| Adjective | |
|---|---|
| comparative | more breakneck |
| superlative | most breakneck |
| Noun | |
| plural | breaknecks |
Origin of breakneck
From break + neck.
Questions about breakneck
- What does breakneck mean?
- Breakneck means dangerously fast; hell-for-leather.
- What is breakneck in Malayalam?
- Breakneck in Malayalam is അതിവേഗമുള്ള, അത്യാപത്കരമായ, സാഹസികമായ. See Breakneck meaning in Malayalam.
- What part of speech is breakneck?
- Breakneck can be an adjective, an adverb or a noun.
- How do you pronounce breakneck?
- Breakneck is pronounced /ˈbɹeɪkˌnɛk/ (UK).
Words near breakneck in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: breakneck (page history and authors); breakneck (Olam, E.K. Kurup corpus) (dataset and license); breakneck (Kannada Wiktionary) (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: LL-Q1860 (eng)-NaomiAmethyst-breakneck.wav.
Cite this entry: “breakneck.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/breakneck. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.