give someone pause
pause
verb[ I or T ]
uk /pɔːz/ us /pɑːz/
B1
to stop doing something for a short time, or to make something stop for a short time: 暂停，停顿
He paused and thought for a moment.他停下来想了一会儿。
She paused to catch her breath, and then kept on jogging.她停下来喘了口气，接着继续慢跑。
A judge has paused the litigation to give both sides a chance to settle their differences.
B2
to make a recording stop for a short time by pressing a button or control: 使…暂停
Can you pause the movie there, please?能请你把电影暂停一下吗？
It is now possible to pause and rewind live television.让实况转播节目暂停或是倒回去重放现在都是可能的了。
She paused at key moments in the scene.在这个场景的关键时刻，她暂停了一下。
He paused for a moment to listen and then continued eating.他停下来听了一会儿，又继续吃饭。
He paused at the top of the hill and mopped his brow .
She paused to light another cigarette and then went on with her account of the accident.
Without pausing to draw breath she told me everything.她气也不喘一口就把一切告诉了我。
Pausing briefly to put on her jumper, Becky carried on along the path.
Getting nowhere, Hause paused the bidding to consult Todd.
They also call for lenders to consider pausing the foreclosure process once a homeowner has contacted them.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Pauses & interludes
abeyance
adjournment
asynchronously
break
break-journey
caesura
comfort stop
hiatus
hold something in abeyance
in abeyance
interlude
intermission
interval
moratorium
non-continuous
one-stop
plateau
postponement
respite
suspension

pause | American Dictionary

pause
noun[ C ]
us/pɔz/
a moment in which something, such as a sound or an activity, stops before starting again:
There was a long pause during which we all wondered what he would say next.

pause

verb[ I ]us/pɔz/
She paused to catch her breath.

Examples of pause

pause
Here he paused, but he wanted to go on.
He stopped walking and the creature paused and turned.
Thus, the rate measure encompasses the duration of the prime word, the duration of the target word, and the duration of any pauses between them.
An utterance was defined as a statement bound by pauses containing one verb.
While they were singing, she occasionally walked around the room, pausing to listen to individual singers and to check their accuracy of pitch and tuning.
Perceptible pauses were marked in the transciptions, but were not measured individually in milliseconds.
In particular, word boundaries do not correspond at all consistently to pauses in production.
The words were read by a speech synthesizer in random order in immediate succession, without pauses or any other prosodic cues.
However, only writing fluency and total number of pauses were affected by domain-specific processing loads.
Nonwords were presented individually, pausing the tape in between each nonword to allow the participant unlimited time to attempt to repeat the item.
After each target word was presented in the story, the examiner paused the tape and administered the two comprehension probes for that item.
Makes long pauses, often repeats the other person's words.
The presence of the light was sufficient to reduce the number of long pauses by 35 per cent.
In addition, there was a strong tendency for the remaining pauses to occur in the first half of a clause rather than the second half.
Again, eight measures later, the piano pauses the action at a fermata, while the tape grows busy until 89270.
See all examples of pause
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.