contraction
Meanings
noun
- Senses relating to becoming involved with or entering into, especially entering into a contract.
- An act of incurring debt; also (generally), an act of acquiring something (generally negative).
- An act of entering into a contract or agreement; specifically, a contract of marriage; a contracting; also (obsolete), a betrothal.
- The process of contracting or becoming infected with a disease.
- Senses relating to pulling together or shortening.
- A (sometimes reversible) contracting or reduction in length, scope, size, or volume; a narrowing, a shortening, a shrinking.
- An abridgement or shortening of writing, etc.; an abstract, a summary; also (uncountable), brevity, conciseness.
- A stage of wound healing during which the wound edges are gradually pulled together.
- A shortening of a muscle during its use; specifically, a strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth.
- A period of economic decline or negative growth.
- A process whereby one or more sounds of a free morpheme (a word) are reduced or lost, such that it becomes a bound morpheme (a clitic) that attaches phonologically to an adjacent word.
- In the English language: a shortened form of a word, often with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe or a diacritical mark.
Pronunciation
Word forms
Etymology
PIE word *ḱóm From Late Middle English contraccioun, contraxion (“spasm, contraction; constriction, shrinking; act of pressing together”), from Old French contraction (modern French contraction), from Latin contractiō(n) (“a drawing together, contraction; abridgement, shortening; dejection, despondency”), from contrahō (“to draw things together, assemble, collect, gather; to enter into a contract”) + -tiō(n) (suffix forming nouns relating to actions or their results). Contrahō is derived from con- (prefix denoting a bringing together of objects) + trahō (“to drag, pull”) (probably from Proto-Indo-European *dʰregʰ- (“to drag, pull; to run”)). By surface analysis, contract + -ion (suffix denoting actions or processes, or their results).
Synonyms
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Translations
This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.