to stop: to leave off doing something, or for something to come to an end or run out
At its heart this word means to stop. What was happening, or being done, or simply present now does so no longer. The same verb covers an action winding down on its own, a person deliberately quitting what they were doing, and a thing or a kind of person dropping out of existence altogether. Context, not the word itself, tells you which.
One side of the word looks at events: the rain stops, counting stops because the grain is past counting, the music and laughter die away. The other side looks at people choosing to quit: a prophet falls silent, builders walk off an unfinished city, a son is told to stop listening to bad advice. Often it is a blunt command, a one-word "Stop!" thrown at someone in the middle of acting.
A close cousin of the choosing sense is holding back. When a decision hangs in the balance, this is the verb for the second option: should I go to war, or hold off? Whether they listen or refuse, do or hold back. Here stopping is not ending something already underway but declining to act at all.
The last shade is loss. The poor never disappear from the land, the highways fell empty, kinsmen failed and were gone, the proud warriors gave out. Here nothing is being deliberately quit; something or someone simply ceases to be there. The single verb holds all of this together because each is a form of one plain idea: it stops.