cease and desist

Idioms and Phrases

Stop, leave off doing something, as in: “Bliss excavated at least once on his own and Dr. Brand ... told him to cease and desist” (Douglas Preston quoting Frank Hibben, The New Yorker , June 12, 1995). This legal term is a redundancy, since cease and desist mean virtually the same thing, but often appears in legal documents to avoid possible misinterpretation. [c. 1920]