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contraction

Pronunciation: /kənˈtɹækʃn̩/

The English word “contraction” has 13 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. An act of incurring debt; also (generally), an act of acquiring something (generally negative).
  2. An act of entering into a contract or agreement; specifically, a contract of marriage; a contracting; also (obsolete), a betrothal.
  3. The process of contracting or becoming infected with a disease.
  4. An abridgement or shortening of writing, etc.; an abstract, a summary; also (uncountable), brevity, conciseness.
  5. A stage of wound healing during which the wound edges are gradually pulled together.
  6. A shortening of a muscle during its use; specifically, a strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth.
  7. A period of economic decline or negative growth.
  8. 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.
  9. In the English language: a shortened form of a word, often with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe or a diacritical mark.
  10. Synonym of syncope (“the elision or loss of a sound from the interior of a word, especially of a vowel sound with loss of a syllable”).
  11. The preimage of the given ideal under the given homomorphism.
  12. A shorthand symbol indicating an omission for the purpose of brevity.
  13. An act of collecting or gathering.

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…

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