break someone's heart

Idioms and Phrases

Cause severe emotional pain or grief. For example, If the verdict is guilty, it will break her mother's heart . This hyperbole has appeared in works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, and George Bernard Shaw, among others. In noun form it appears as both a broken heart and heartbreak (Shaw wrote a play entitled Heartbreak House , 1913). Today it also is used ironically, as in You only scored an A-minus on the final? That breaks my heart! [Late 1300s]