A failure to perform some promised act or obligation

Usage examples of breach.

If any complain of this breach of honour, I must tell them that I had made a mental reservation not to keep my promise, and those who are acquainted with the morality of the children of Ignatius will understand that I was completely at my ease.

But as the breach between himself and Congress widened, as the bitterness between the partisans of the Executive and of the Legislative Departments grew more intense, the belief became general, that, as soon as Congress should adjourn, there would be a removal of all Federal officers throughout the Union who were not faithful to the principles, and did not respond to the exactions, of the Administration.

In consequence of what he considered a breach of faith on the question, he voted against the passage of the Amnesty Bill, Senator Nye of Nevada being the only one who united with him in the negative vote.

The final wave had breasted the wall to the south of the barbican, but the reinforcement company had filled the breach and driven them back.

He pointed to where the goblins had cleared the breach through the outer gate of the barbican once more and were now climbing up the inner gate.

Bengalis and Highlanders hunted through the ruins, their war cries shrill as they bayoneted and shot the garrison, while behind them, before the smoke of the carcasses had even begun to fade or the fighting in the mill die down, the engineers were constructing a stouter bridge across which they could haul their siege guns so they could turn the old mill into a breaching battery.

The hard plastic was breached in places by biochip boards wired in at odd angles.

We have from time to time for these several years bypast, emitted and published several declarations and publick testimonies against the breaches of the same, as is evident not only from our declarations of late, but also from all the wrestlings and contendings of the faithful in former times, all which we here adhere to, approve of, and homologate, as they are founded upon the Word of God and are agreeable thereto.

There was no breach of security, either, in glancing down the street where the Café Racine retired so modestly from the busy traffic of Saint-Germain.

Park of Extinct Animals was breached and many of the inner enclosures were opened, releasing into the wilderness nearly the entire extraordinary collection of carefully cloned beasts of yesteryear: moas, quaggas, giant ground sloths, dodos, passenger pigeons, aurochs, oryxes, saber-toothed cats, great auks, cahows and many another lost species that had been called back from oblivion by the most painstaking manipulation of fossil genetic material.

It was known that while Count Joscelin of Edessa had been celebrating the season of the Nativity at one of his estates upon the upper reaches of the Euphrates, Moslem hordes had fallen upon his principal city on the northern outposts of the Latin Kingdom, breached its walls, laid low its altars, and taken its burghers into captivity.

Three of us dived on the wreck - Chubby, Sherry and myself - and we manhandled the stiff black snake of the hose through the gunport and up into the breach through the well of the hold.

My very heart rose when I saw the bull-dog fellows clambering up the breach with their pikes at the trail, and never quavering in their psalm-tune, though the bullets sung around them as thick as bees in the hiving time.

They sagged and bowed, water breaching them in gouts and diluting the riverbed, eddying around the feet of the few remaining strikers, coiling like the gas above it, until with a shiver the Gross Tar reknit itself, healing the little rift that had paralysed it and confused its currents.

Possibly some such plan might have had some chance of success had the forces of the Entente been concentrated upon a single effort, and optimistic critics anticipated a breach to the north of Verdun which might close or at least threaten the neck of the German bottle between Metz and Limburg and precipitate a withdrawal from their carefully prepared positions in northern France and Belgium.