The article is devoted to the break as a “point of failure” in spontaneous speech. The analysis of monologues from the “Balanced Annotated Text Library” showed that the speaker more often finishes a broken word, performing self-correction. And the word usually finished without any changes (57.9 % of all breaks are associated with a zero cancelation). Instant (on-line) reaction to the break also prevails over the off-line reaction in almost all types of texts (retelling, description of the image and story). Various causes can lead to the breakage: (1) ordinary hesitation ( na sve… - na svete ); (2) some perfectionism of the speaker: having already begun to utter the word, he still decides to spread, “decorate”, it ( on z… - priyatno zamurlykal ); (3) word selection from a pair of synonyms ( vra… - doktor ), including contextual ones ( ush… - zabezhal - zalez ), words that are semantically close ( zasunu… - pritsepil ), antonyms ( v sv… - v teni ), grammatical ( ve… [vecherom] - s vechera ) or phonetic ( za lyos… - za lesku ) variants; (4) attempt to pronounce an idiom or other “non-trivial” unit ( gla… - v gla… - vzora netu v glazakh bleska nikakogo ); (5) an error in the previous word ( ivy razro… - lipy razroslis’ ); (7) the speaker's blooper ( izh… - izbushka ). The analysis of the breaks as a hesitation phenomenon allows us to see both the causes of the emergence of the “point of failure” (colloquialistics) and the ways of the speaker’s “exit” from the communicative difficulty (psycholinguistics and cognitive science).