breakthrough

[breyk-throo]

noun

1. a military movement or advance all the way through and beyond an enemy's frontline defense.

2. an act or instance of removing or surpassing an obstruction or restriction; the overcoming of a stalemate.

   The president reported a breakthrough in the treaty negotiations.

3. any significant or sudden advance, development, achievement, or increase, as in scientific knowledge or diplomacy, that removes a barrier to progress.

   The jet engine was a major breakthrough in air transport.

4. Medicine/Medical.,  an infection, disease, disorder, or condition that occurs in an individual despite their having received a vaccine, medication, or treatment.

   Covid breakthroughs are usually less severe than infections in unvaccinated people, indicating that the vaccine is still doing its job of combating the virus.

adjective

1. constituting a breakthrough: Critics called it a breakthrough film.

   Their products are engineered with breakthrough technology.

   Critics called it a breakthrough film.

2. Medicine/Medical.,  relating to or being an infection, disease, disorder, or condition that occurs as a breakthrough: She experienced disabling breakthrough pain despite the high dose of painkillers she was taking.

   In the original vaccine trial, 89% of breakthrough infections were with a particular family of virus strains.

   She experienced disabling breakthrough pain despite the high dose of painkillers she was taking.

Word History and Origins

Origin of breakthrough¹

First recorded in 1915–20; noun use of verb phrase break through

Example Sentences

But I haven’t seen much investment to drive growth by improving affordability or through breakthrough innovation.

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The field has seen leading tech giants claim breakthroughs in recent years that have later been questioned by researchers.

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By refining these techniques into a matrix-free microarray system and pairing them with patient-specific immune cells, the CuSTOM Accelerator team at Cincinnati Children's turned a scientific breakthrough into a scalable precision toxicology tool.

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That’s the implication of a theory developed several decades ago that was published in a 2002 letter to the scientific journal Nature — hardly where you’d expect to read about a theoretical breakthrough about market crashes.

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In a breakthrough that connects modern science with ideas first explored a century ago, researchers have witnessed a surprising phenomenon once thought possible only in inorganic metal oxides appearing inside a glowing organic semiconductor molecule.

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Related Words

• boost 
• development 
• discovery 
• finding 
• gain 
• hike 
• improvement 
• leap 
• progress