breakup

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

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Etymonline

Word Origin & History

breakup

also break up, late 15c., from break + up. Originally of groups, assemblies, etc. ("Break it up" as a command to stop a fight, etc., is recorded from 1936). Of things (also of marriages, relationships), "to disintegrate," from mid-18c. The noun is recorded from 1795.

Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
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Example sentences

And the ice shelf breakup wasn't the only geologic disturbance on the island

that summer.

The first is routine space pursuits and the accidental breakup of objects in

orbit.

They produced two babies and wrote a few confessional songs about each other

before an acrimonious breakup.

In the other model, the burst was created by the breakup of a comet as it

neared a lone neutron star.

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Matching Quote

"Trains are for meditation, for playing out long thought-processes, over and over; we trust them, perhaps because they have no choice but to go where they are going. Nowadays, however, they smack of a dying gentility. To travel by car makes journeys less mysterious, too much a matter of the will. One might as easily sit on a sofa and imagine a passing landscape. I doubt whether any truly absorbing conversation ever took place in a car; they are good only for word games and long, tedious narratives. We have come to regard cars too much as appendages of our bodies and will probably pay for it in the end by losing the use of our legs. We owe to them the cluttering of the landscape, the breakup of villages and towns."

-Alastair Reid

breakup

break·up