Aborters

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. People who stop a procedure or action before it is completed
2. Individuals who end an operation or event before reaching its natural conclusion
3. Persons responsible for halting a task or project prematurely and preventing its completion

Etymology: "Aborters" is the plural of "aborter," an agent noun made from "abort" and the suffix "-er." The verb "abort" comes from Latin "abortare," the frequentative of "aborior," meaning "to miscarry" or "to fail to be born," built from "ab-" (away from) and "oriri" (to rise or be born). Its earliest English sense was therefore the biological one, a birth that does not reach completion, and the verb only later took on the wider sense of stopping something before it finishes. The suffix "-er" has a long pedigree of its own. It descends from Latin "-arius," which passed through Old French "-ier" into Middle English "-er," and it was originally a marker of a person connected with a thing or activity. Attaching it to "abort" produced a term for someone who causes a stoppage.