h₁rewp-
“to tear, to break”tear, rip, rupture
Root for tearing/breaking, yielding Latin rumpere (to break), English rip, rob, robe.
Discussion
The PIE root *h₁rewp- (to tear, to break, to snatch) produced one of the most violently expressive word families in the Indo-European vocabulary, a set of descendants that have preserved the original sense of sudden, forceful disruption across three millennia.
Latin rumpere (to break, to burst) is the central reflex, with the nasal infix characteristic of Latin present stems (cf. frangere, tangere). The past participle ruptus (broken) is the more productive form in English derivatives: rupture (a breaking, a burst), corrupt (broken together, thoroughly broken — hence morally broken, dishonest), erupt (to break out, as a volcano), disrupt (to break apart), interrupt (to break between), abrupt (broken off, sudden), and bankrupt (from Italian banca rotta, "broken bench" — the moneylender's table broken to signify insolvency).
The Germanic branch shows the root in Old English rēafian (to rob, to plunder — literally to tear away, to snatch by force), which gave Modern English reave (archaic) and the agent noun reaver. The Norse cognate is preserved in the English bereft (past participle of bereave, to tear away from someone). German rauben (to rob) and Raub (robbery, plunder) continue the same form. The connection between tearing and stealing is semantically transparent: robbery is the forcible tearing-away of possessions.
Old English also preserves rēofan (to tear, to break) and the related rūpan, though these forms became obsolete in Middle English as the Latin-derived rupture family displaced the native words.
The Greek reflex is debated. Some scholars connect Greek eréiptō (ἐρείπτω, "to tear down, to demolish") to this root, giving English ereipnos (ruins) — though the phonological details are contested.
Sanskrit rupyati (he breaks) and the related lumpáti (he breaks, he tears) provide Indo-Iranian attestation, with the variation between r- and l- forms reflecting dialectal differences within the branch.
The root's semantic coherence across branches is notable: Latin rumpere (break), Germanic rēafian (rob/tear away), and Sanskrit rupyati (break) all preserve the core image of violent disruption. The metaphorical extensions — corrupt (morally broken), bankrupt (financially broken), erupt (breaking out from within), abrupt (suddenly broken off) — show how a single physical image of tearing was extended to moral, financial, temporal, and geological domains, each time preserving the visceral force of the original root.
Notes
Pokorny 868. English rupture, corrupt, erupt.