Contraction vs Abridgement - What's the difference?
contraction | abridgement |
A reversible reduction in size.
(economics) A period of economic decline or negative growth.
(biology) A shortening of a muscle when it is used.
(medicine) A strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth.
(linguistics) 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.
(English orthography) A word with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe, usually resulting from the above process.
(medicine) Contracting a disease.
(phonetics) Syncope, the loss of sounds from within a word.
The acquisition of something, generally negative.
(medicine) A distinct stage of wound healing, wherein the wound edges are gradually pulled together.
As nouns the difference between contraction and abridgement
is that contraction is a reversible reduction in size while abridgement is (chiefly|uk).contraction
English
Noun
(en noun)- The country's economic contraction was caused by high oil prices.
- In English ''didn't'', ''that's'', and ''wanna'', the endings ''-n't'', ''-'s'', and ''-a'' arose by contraction .
- "Don't" is a contraction of "do not."
- The contraction of AIDS from toilet seats is extremely rare.
- Our contraction of debt in this quarter has reduced our ability to attract investors.