refrainformal

Thesaurus: synonyms, antonyms, and examples

to end something or cause it to end
stopStop pulling your brother's hair this instant!
quitQuit poking your sister, will you?
haltWe halted the assembly line to check the equipment.
discontinueThe lab has discontinued this line of research due to ethical concerns.
ceaseAll operations at the company will cease, and the assets will be auctioned off.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Abstaining and refraining
abstain
abstain from something
abstainer
abstemious
abstemiously
cut
disengagement
fast
forbear
forbearance
give up
hors de combat
pull
pull back
step
step back
stop
stop short of somethingidiom
touch
truck

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Causing something to end

desist | American Dictionary

desist
verb[ I ]
 fmlus/dɪˈzɪst, -ˈsɪst/
to stop doing something:
She was ordered to desist from playing music after 11 p.m.

Examples of desist

desist
With rampant unemployment and a surplus of labor, many workers desisted from joining unions out of fear of such reprisals.
I desist from trying to specify too precisely what the upper limit might be on the size of a workable legislative assembly.
Although we found significant decreases in the mean levels of problem behavior, the categorical analyses revealed that more children persist than desist in problem behavior.
Another question is whether individuals who desist do so under better educational and employment conditions compared to persisting delinquents.
Out of that group, almost 40% desisted in serious offending between ages 20 and 25.
But to desist from these truly vital questions would appear to us as dereliction of duty.
Therefore, it is necessary to stipulate how large the window needs to be to consider a person as having desisted.
When asked to pay the same, they requested the authorities to desist from flouting traditions.
In early adulthood, endorsing an antisocial lifestyle and being employed or in school were closely related to patterns of persisting or desisting in crime.
It also seems likely that some of the individuals desisted earlier than the desistance window of ages 20 -25 used in this analysis.
In time, such efforts desist from being sunk costs, and instead acquire utility value.
With a few notable exceptions, injunctions have been generally recognized as less effective enforcement tools than cease and desist orders.
A class of individuals, labeled childhood limited, who demonstrated conduct problems in childhood but subsequently desisted, was also identified (24.3%).
They found that antisocial adolescents who desisted from criminality had significantly greater physiological arousal and orienting than antisocial adolescents who became adult criminals.
The ease with which she desists, with which song fades back into speech, underscores all the more her discomfort with music, her inability or unwillingness to let herself go.
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.