1. [v]  end prematurely; "She interrupted her pregnancy"; "break a lucky streak"
2. [v]  destroy the peace or tranquility of; "Don't interrupt me when I'm reading"
3. [v]  interfere in someone else's activity; "Please don't interrupt me while I'm on the phone"
4. [v]  make a break in; "We interrupt the program for the following messages"

1. \In`ter*rupt"\, v. t. [imp. & p. p. {Interrupted}; p.
   pr. & vb. n. {Interrupting}.] [L. interruptus, p. p. of
   interrumpere to interrupt; inter between + rumpere to break.
   See {Rupture}.]
   1. To break into, or between; to stop, or hinder by breaking
      in upon the course or progress of; to interfere with the
      current or motion of; to cause a temporary cessation of;
      as, to interrupt the remarks speaking.
            Do not interrupt me in my course.     --Shak.
   2. To divide; to separate; to break the monotony of; as, the
      evenness of the road was not interrupted by a single hill.
   

2. \In`ter*rupt"\, p. a. [L. interruptus, p. p.]
   Broken; interrupted. [Obs.] --Milton.
   

1. An asynchronous event that suspends normal processing and temporarily diverts the flow of control through an "interrupt handler" routine.

Interrupts may be caused by both hardware (I/O, timer, machine check) and software (supervisor, system call or trap instruction).

In general the computer responds to an interrupt by storing the information about the current state of the running program; storing information to identify the source of the interrupt; and invoking a first-level interrupt handler. This is usually a kernel level privileged process that can discover the precise cause of the interrupt (e.g. if several devices share one interrupt) and what must be done to keep operating system tables (such as the process table) updated. This first-level handler may then call another handler, e.g. one associated with the particular device which generated the interrupt.

2. Under MS-DOS, nearly synonymous with "system call" because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction (see interrupt list) and because programmers so often have to bypass the operating system (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance.

[Jargon File]