Crossword clues for contraction
contraction
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Contraction \Con*trac"tion\, n. [L. contractio: cf. F. contraction.]
The act or process of contracting, shortening, or shrinking; the state of being contracted; as, contraction of the heart, of the pupil of the eye, or of a tendon; the contraction produced by cold.
(Math.) The process of shortening an operation.
The act of incurring or becoming subject to, as liabilities, obligation, debts, etc.; the process of becoming subject to; as, the contraction of a disease.
Something contracted or abbreviated, as a word or phrase; -- as, plenipo for plenipotentiary; crim. con. for criminal conversation, etc.
(Gram.) The shortening of a word, or of two words, by the omission of a letter or letters, or by reducing two or more vowels or syllables to one; as, ne'er for never; can't for can not; don't for do not; it's for it is.
A marriage contract. [Obs.]
--Shak.
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
late 14c., "action of making a contract" (especially of marriage), also "action of shrinking or shortening," from Old French contraction (13c.), or directly from Latin contractionem (nominative contractio), noun of action from past participle stem of contrahere (see contract (n.)). Meaning "action of acquiring (a disease) is from c.1600. Grammatical sense is from 1706; meaning "a contracted word or words" is from 1755. Contractions of the uterus in labor of childbirth attested from 1962.
Wiktionary
n. 1 A reversible reduction in size. 2 (context economics English) A period of economic decline or negative growth. 3 (context biology English) A shortening of a muscle when it is used. 4 (context medicine English) A strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth. 5 (context linguistics English) A process whereby one or more sounds of a free morpheme (a word) are lost or reduced, such that it becomes a bound morpheme (a clitic) that attaches phonologically to an adjacent word. 6 (context English orthography English) A word with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe, usually resulting from the above process. 7 (context medicine English) contract a disease. 8 (context phonetics English) syncope, the loss of sounds from within a word. 9 The acquisition of something, generally negative. 10 (context medicine English) A distinct stage of wound healing, wherein the wound edges are gradually pulled together.
WordNet
n. (physiology) a shortening or tensing of a part or organ (especially of a muscle or muscle fiber) [syn: muscular contraction, muscle contraction]
the process or result of becoming smaller or pressed together; "the contraction of a gas on cooling" [syn: compression, condensation]
a word formed from two or more words by omitting or combining some sounds; "`won't' is a contraction of `will not'"; "`o'clock' is a contraction of `of the clock'"
the act of decreasing (something) in size or volume or quantity or scope [ant: expansion]
Wikipedia
Contraction may refer to:
- Redirect Contraction (grammar)
In operator theory, a discipline within mathematics, a bounded operator T: X → Y between normed vector spaces X and Y is said to be a contraction if its operator norm ||T|| ≤ 1. Every bounded operator becomes a contraction after suitable scaling. The analysis of contractions provides insight into the structure of operators, or a family of operators. The theory of contractions on Hilbert space is largely due to Béla Szőkefalvi-Nagy and Ciprian Foias.
A contraction is a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with abbreviations nor acronyms (including initialisms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in loose parlance. Contraction is also distinguished from clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.
The definition overlaps with the grammatical term portmanteau (a linguistic blend), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are formed from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept which the portmanteau describes.
Usage examples of "contraction".
In the United States it is used to treat two rare eye conditions, blepharospasm and strabismus, both of which involve excessive muscle contractions.
On stimulus the resultant depolarization is not translated into muscular contraction or any of the other common responses but makes itself evident, instead, as a flow of electricity.
It was an insanely complicated problem, because he had to take into account a quantum twitch in Einsteinian time contraction as the black hole collapsed into existence from a somewhat larger mass, and because the relativistic speed at which the hole was traveling distorted space itself, making a sort of furrow along an Einsteinian geodesic.
There was uterine displacement and some endocervicitis, but no history of injury or operation and no tendency to contraction.
Most men recognize this first contraction as the point of ejaculatory inevitability and take this as an intuitive signal to increase frictional massage of the frenulum and glans and tighten the grip on the base and shaft.
As the pleasurable orgasmic contractions propel semen through the urethra, he will retain his tight grip on the shaft and continue massaging the frenulum and glans, maximizing the pleasure and stroking through the orgasm and its first expulsion of ejaculate.
Both she and Repasi knew that heat applied to skin caused contraction of dermal capillaries, and this forced blood to the periphery of the blister, simulating an antemortem hyperemic inflammatory response.
A hysterograph is an apparatus for measuring the strength of the uterine contractions in labour, did you know that?
This action, at first sight somewhat obscure, is due to the extreme pupillary contraction which removes the mass of the iris from pressing upon the spaces of Fontana, through which the intraocular fluids normally make a very slow escape from the eye into its efferent lymphatics.
Indeed his rendering is so excellent an example of mediaeval learning and latinity that, even at the risk of sating the learned reader with too many antiquities, I have made up my mind to give it in fac-simile, together with an expanded version for the benefit of those who find the contractions troublesome.
Now, it would seem, we must take account of the changing circumference with changing speed due to different degrees of Lorentz contraction.
This is nothing but the Lorentz contraction discussed in Chapter 2, in which the length of an object appears shortened along the direction of its motion.
Conceivable that Lorentz contraction not a physical fact before Michelson experiment?
No one interrupted them, however, and they went back to the Lorentz contraction equations without further interruption.
And then, with that very thing that doth hinder, thou mayest he well pleased, and so by this gentle and equanimious conversion of thy mind unto that which may be, instead of that which at first thou didst intend, in the room of that former action there succeedeth another, which agrees as well with this contraction of thy life, that we now speak of.