Make shorter than originally intended

Usage examples of shortening.

Again, keeping the amplitude constant, the intensity of stimulus is increased by shortening the wire.

Every day Malemute Kid led the girl out on long walks devoted to the correction of her carriage and the shortening of her stride.

The Horsekin riders were yelling and grabbing manes and necks, shortening up on their reins, clutching their saddle peaks anything to keep from being thrown.

The river crossing had cost them energy he hoped to recoup by shortening their journey.

After a while she began puzzling and mentally shearing off his beard and shortening and restyling his hair.

One bright frosty morning, the sermon happening to have no relation to the light around or within them, but only to the covenant made with Abraham--such a legal document constituting the only reliable protection against the character, inclinations, and duties of the Almighty, whose uncovenanted mercies are of a very doubtful nature--Annie, neither able to enter into the subject, nor to keep from shivering with the cold, tried to amuse herself with gazing at one brilliant sun-streak on the wall, which she had discovered to be gradually shortening itself, and retreating towards the window by which it had entered.

For while a small, and, politically speaking, uninfluential, party are prepared to make every sacrifice and run all risks in order to blot out slavery on the instant, the influential and acting leaders of the majority, whatever their occasional language of denunciation, and affectation of horror, are not disposed to brave the rebellion of the South, and the possible disruption of the Republic, for the sake of shortening the thraldom of the negro some fifty years.

There I untied the leash and then retied it, considerably shortening it.

He used a colloquial shortening of the phrase as soon as possible transliterated from their outland tongue-the outland trick of using the initial letters of each word in a phrase to represent the phrase itself was one that was creeping steadily into the Wathe as well.

You may immediately roll out both crusts, or wrap each disk in plastic and refrigerate for 15 to 30 minutesif this is more convenient or if the kitchen is very warm or if you have used lard and butter as your shortening.

I reasoned, not as one that hopes, but rather as one that foresaw that Edgar would hinder me from shortening my days.

He had a curious recollection of how his knowledge of Inchling and his wife being always in concert, entirely--whatever they might think in private --devoted to him in action, had influenced, if it had not originally sprung, his resolve to cast off the pestilential cloak of obscurity shortening his days, and emerge before a world he could illumine to give him back splendid reflections.

If you could only see how many spirits there are in darkness who cling to human bodies and obsess people and send them to the asylums, or to the spirit world by shortening their lives.

The ship flew before the strong westerlies and we sailormen were up and down the rigging like monkeys, often led by the fearless Captain himself, shortening or furling sails when gales blew, shaking them out when the wind slackened.

Out of the corner of his eye Crosby also noted with some interest the hesitating hoverings of a human figure, which had passed and repassed his seat two or three times at shortening intervals, like a wary crow about to alight near some possibly edible morsel.