force quit

verb

variants or force-quit

ˈfȯrs-ˌkwit 

force quit or force-quit; force quitting or force-quitting; force quits or force-quits

transitive + intransitive

: to force (an unresponsive computer program) to shut down (as by using a series of preset keystrokes)

When Internet Explorer locks up and sucks down CPU cycles, you can easily force quit to kill the process …

—Andy Ihnatko

The process would also ignore any attempts to pause or stop the playback until long after the commands were given, and on more than one occasion, I found that it was quicker to force quit and relaunch the browser …

—Jim Regan

I experienced a couple of crashes that required me to force-quit the app to get back to reading.

—Lex Friedman

How do you get an application to quit when you can't access its Quit command? In the spirit of freedom of choice, OS X offers a few ways to force-quit a program.

—Ted Landau

Examples of force quit in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

How to force quit an app on iPhone, iPad Apple has a very simple solution for dealing with an unresponsive app on your iPhone and iPad. —USA TODAY, 24 Feb. 2024

Microsoft is working on a force quit option to close apps without the Task Manager in Windows 11 simply from a right-click option in the taskbar. —Tom Warren, The Verge, 16 Aug. 2023

Word History

First Known Use

1991, in the meaning defined above