lapse into sth
lapse
noun
uk /læps/us
[ C ]
a mistake that is made because of a temporary lack of attention to something:
lapse in sthThere had been a lapse in security at the company, and the personal details of hundreds of customers had been made public.
a security lapse
[ C,usually singular ]
a period of time that passes between two things happening:
The company will resume paying a quarterly dividend on common shares, following a two-year lapse.
a time lapse

Examples of lapse

lapse
Occasional factual lapses occur (for instance, the assertion that schizophrenia is more widespread than depression), but they are few.
If a bill does not complete its parliamentary course in a session, it lapses.
Such lapses may occur, for example, because the parent is still searching for the lost person, or denying the person is dead.
Other criticisms might be that the chapters are a bit miscellaneous and that the style suffers occasional lapses.
Similarly, simple venial mistakes or lapses in professionalism may be distinguished from those egregiously unprofessional behaviors that warrant serious remediation or dismissal.
The patrols did resurface in late 1937 but seem to have lapsed thereafter.
In any event, memory lapses are likely to present major reliability problems.
If the work is not begun within this time limit, the permission lapses.
The" explosion" in and of the sentence recalls the protagonist's lapsed faith.
However, as time lapsed, each political party reached the limit in terms of making policy compromises with coalition partners.
Each chapter lapses on occasion into redundant observations which, while irrefutable, merely support existing scholarship rather than offering fresh perspectives.
Examples of lapses in the monitoring of reasoning include statements implying that the lost person is simultaneously dead and alive in the physical sense.
There are several grammatical lapses and editorial control could have been a little tighter.
He lapsed brief ly into a coma and died.
Before the introduction of stakeholder pensions in 2001, there were often quite severe financial penalties for consumers who lapsed, because of high upfront charges.
See all examples of lapse
These examples are from corpora and from sources on the web. Any opinions in the examples do not represent the opinion of the Cambridge Dictionary editors or of Cambridge University Press or its licensors.

Collocations withlapse

lapse

These are words often used in combination with lapse.

Click on a collocation to see more examples of it.

lapse of concentration
It was the longest lapse of concentration that we have seen.
From the
Hansard archive