abstract

1 of 3

adjective

ab·stract ab-ˈstrakt

ˈab-ˌstrakt

Synonyms of abstract next

: disassociated from any specific instance

an abstract entity

: difficult to understand : abstruse

abstract problems

: insufficiently factual : formal

possessed only an abstract right

: expressing a quality apart from an object

the word poem is concrete, poetry is abstract

: dealing with a subject in its abstract aspects : theoretical

abstract science

: impersonal, detached

the abstract compassion of a surgeon—

Time

: having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content

abstract painting

abstractly

ab-ˈstrak(t)-lē

ˈab-ˌstrak(t)-

adverb

abstractness

ab-ˈstrak(t)-nəs

ˈab-ˌstrak(t)-

noun

abstract

2 of 3

noun

ab·stract ˈab-ˌstrakt

in sense 2 also

ab-ˈstrakt

: a summary of points (as of a writing) usually presented in skeletal form

also : something that summarizes or concentrates the essentials of a larger thing or several things

: an abstract thing or state (see abstract entry 1)

: abstraction sense 4a

abstract

3 of 3

verb

ab·stract ab-ˈstrakt

ˈab-ˌstrakt

in sense 3 usually

ˈab-ˌstrakt

abstracted; abstracting; abstracts

transitive verb

: to make a summary or abstract of : summarize

abstract an academic paper

: to draw away the attention of

His imagination had so abstracted him that his name was called twice before he answered.—

James Joyce

: steal, purloin

She abstracted important documents from the safe.

: remove, separate

: to consider apart from application to or association with a particular instance

intransitive verb

: to make an abstraction

abstractable

ab-ˈstrak-tə-bəl

ˈab-ˌstrak-

adjective

abstractor noun

or abstracter

ab-ˈstrak-tər

ˈab-ˌstrak-

Did you know?

The Crisscrossing Histories of Abstract and Extract

Abstract is most frequently used as an adjective (“abstract ideas”) and a noun (“an abstract of the article”), but its somewhat less common use as a verb in English helps to clarify its Latin roots. The verb abstract is used to mean “summarize,” as in “abstracting an academic paper.” This meaning is a figurative derivative of the verb’s meanings “to remove” or “to separate.”

We trace the origins of abstract to the combination of the Latin roots ab-, a prefix meaning “from” or “away,” with the verb trahere, meaning “to pull” or “to draw.” The result was the Latin verb abstrahere, which meant “to remove forcibly” or “to drag away.” Its past participle abstractus had the meanings “removed,” “secluded,” “incorporeal,” and, ultimately, “summarized,” meanings which came to English from Medieval Latin.

Interestingly, the word passed from Latin into French with competing spellings as both abstract (closer to the Latin) and abstrait (which reflected the French form of abstrahere, abstraire), the spelling retained in modern French.

The idea of “removing” or “pulling away” connects abstract to extract, which stems from Latin through the combination of trahere with the prefix ex-, meaning “out of” or “away from.” Extract forms a kind of mirror image of abstract: more common as a verb, but also used as a noun and adjective. The adjective, meaning “derived or descended,” is now obsolete, as is a sense of the noun that overlapped with abstract, “summary.” The words intersected and have separated in modern English, but it’s easy to see that abstract applies to something that has been summarized, and summarized means “extracted from a larger work.”

Example Sentences

Adjective It is true that the atrocities that were known remained abstract and remote, rarely acquiring the status of knee-buckling knowledge among ordinary Americans. Because the savagery of genocide so defies our everyday experience, many of us failed to wrap our minds around it. —

Samantha Power, New York Times Book Review, 14 Mar. 2002

A glance into the classrooms of the Los Angeles public school system … fleshes out the abstract debates with the faces of children. —

Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel, 1997

I take my photographs and print them on a laser copying machine in the "photo" mode; the resulting image is more stark and abstract than a traditional photographic print, which tends to dominate the page regardless of the text. —

Leslie Marmon Silko, Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit, 1996

abstract ideas such as love and hate “Honesty” is an abstract word. The word “poem” is concrete, the word “poetry” is abstract. Noun an artist admired for his abstracts the scientist wrote a bare-bones abstract of his research and conclusions Verb … artists in the group put the emphasis on geometric abstraction rather than images abstracted from nature. —

Robert Atkins, Art Spoke, 1993

… the Romantic project was to abstract from religion its essential "feeling" and leave contemptuously behind its traditional formulations. —

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 1969

… conscientiously and with great purity made the uncompromising effort to abstract his view of life into an art work … —

Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 1959

… basic esthetic criteria and standards he has abstracted from long intimacy with time-tested masterpieces. —

Aline B. Saarinen, New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1954

Data for the study was abstracted from hospital records. personal problems abstracted him so persistently that he struggled to keep his mind on his work See More

Recent Examples on the Web

Adjective

What’s clear, though, is that workplace child care benefits aren’t some abstract idea being floated by businesses or the U.S. government for some far-off future. —

Emily Tate Sullivan, USA TODAY, 16 May 2023 In 2017, after years of vacancy and decay, four Black artists, conceptual artist Adam Pendleton, sculptor and painter Rashid Johnson, collagist and filmmaker Ellen Gallagher, and abstract artist Julie Mehretu, joined forces to purchase Simone’s childhood home for $95,000 to save it from demolition. —

Evan Nicole Brown, The Hollywood Reporter, 28 Apr. 2023 In contrast, Brown tries to straddle two distinct idioms: abstract mark-making and impressionistic figuration. —

Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 27 Apr. 2023 But when Grey Canyon exhibited at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in 1980, the members found that their modern paintings and abstract art clashed with some people’s stereotypical expectations of Native artists. —

Jillian Steinhauer, New York Times, 20 Apr. 2023 In another recent post, the reality TV star looked glamorous in an abstract take on the little black dress, pulled from Acne Studios's fall 2023 collection. —

Chelsey Sanchez, Harper's BAZAAR, 18 Apr. 2023 Prompted, Leslie Feist turns and looks up behind her at a large, bright, abstract painting, hanging on its own on an otherwise bare wall. —

Liza Lentini, SPIN, 17 Apr. 2023 Heleen Blanken uses digital codes to create a watery video backdrop that’s abstract and distracting; the real ocean, saturated with plastic and oil, might have been more effective. —

Jeffrey Gantz, BostonGlobe.com, 7 Apr. 2023 The de Menils interpreted this as an abstract expression of an upside-down Washington Monument shortly after Reverend King's assassination. —

Robin Soslow, Chron, 2 Apr. 2023

Noun

But, as an abstract presented at AACR showed, most Americans still don’t – despite there being a perfectly good vaccine that can prevent HPV since 2006. —

Angus Chen Reprints, STAT, 20 Apr. 2023 Being whole is something that mostly has been an abstract, particularly since Feb. 2, Kyle Lowry’s last game before being sidelined by knee pain. —

Ira Winderman, Sun Sentinel, 10 Mar. 2023 The gilt frame around an Alexis Walter abstract plays off the bed’s delicate gold leaf detailing and the Visual Comfort lamps. —

House Beautiful, 2 Mar. 2023 Many announcements from the first few days are already making headlines as fans of artificial intelligence look forward to the future and attempt to piece together an abstract for where the best opportunities exist in the industry and biggest consumer products will hit. —

Q.ai - Powering A Personal Wealth Movement, Forbes, 10 Jan. 2023 Here is the abstract: In the last few years, two paradigms underlying human evolution have crumbled. —

Razib Khan, Discover Magazine, 20 July 2012 The abstract for the study lists two sources of funding – FastGrants and the Rainwater Charitable Foundation. —

Nate Trela, USA TODAY, 1 Dec. 2022 Here’s a very short abstract from the profile summary. —

Stephen Ibaraki, Forbes, 12 July 2022 An abstract is a more general interpretation of your pet that captures its colors and themes in a creative way. —

Amber Smith, Discover Magazine, 13 May 2022

Verb

ChatGPT probably records more copy and paste actions than any other website in the world; Google is abstracting that whole process away into a button. —

Casey Newton, The Verge, 12 May 2023 These are coming with new software platforms that abstract the applications away from the hardware. —

Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 22 Mar. 2023 But so many of us still have the luxury, with our clean air and water, our safety, our lack of proximity, of abstracting disaster into polemic instead. —

Sarah Stankorb, The New Republic, 1 Mar. 2023 For the astronomers working on the Carte du Ciel, no model yet existed that could abstract the positions of millions of stars into a theory of how our galaxy evolved; the researchers instead only had an intuition that photographic techniques could be useful to map the world. —

H.j. Mccracken, Ars Technica, 13 Sep. 2022 So to abstract the nose is to erase all possible recognition of a character as someone related or familiar to the viewer and instead creates the possibility that this character could be anyone, that what is happening to the character could happen to anyone. . —

Ian Parker, The New Yorker, 22 Feb. 2021 That means adopting tools and technologies that abstract away underlying cryptographic primitives and that can change readily. —

Patrick Walsh, Forbes, 11 Nov. 2022 Many of Saunders’s bags, in tomato red and Yves Klein blue, come with malleable wire framing so that the wearer can abstract the classic square shape into something more surreal. —

Steff Yotka, Vogue, 22 July 2022 From there, determine the context analytics must abstract for each of those sub-domains. —

Amandeep Midha, Forbes, 19 May 2022 See More

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abstract.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

Etymology

Adjective

Middle English, "withdrawn, removed, abstruse, extracted from a longer work, (of nouns in grammar) not concrete," borrowed from Medieval Latin abstractus "removed, secluded, incorporeal, universal, extracted from a larger work, summarized," going back to Latin, past participle of abstrahere "to remove forcibly, turn aside, divert," from abs- (variant of ab- ab- before c- and t-) + trahere "to drag, draw, take along" — more at draw entry 1

Noun

Middle English, derivative of abstract abstract entry 1 (or borrowed directly from Medieval Latin abstractus)

Verb

Middle English abstracten "to draw away, remove," derivative of abstract abstract entry 1 (or borrowed directly from Latin abstractus)

First Known Use

Adjective

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Noun

14th century, in the meaning defined at sense 2

Verb

15th century, in the meaning defined at transitive sense 4

Time Traveler

The first known use of abstract was in the 14th century

See more words from the same century

Cite this Entry

Style

“Abstract.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstract. Accessed 10 Jun. 2023.

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Kids Definition

abstract

1 of 3 adjective

ab·stract ab-ˈstrakt

ˈab-ˌstrakt

: expressing a quality or idea without reference to an actual person or thing

"honesty" is an abstract word

: difficult to understand : hard

abstract problems

: using elements of form (as color, line, or texture) with little or no attempt at creating a realistic picture

abstract art

abstractly

ab-ˈstrak-(t)lē

ˈab-ˌstrak-

adverb

abstractness

ab-ˈstrak(t)-nəs

ˈab-ˌstrak(t)-

noun

abstract

2 of 3 noun

ab·stract ˈab-ˌstrakt

: a brief statement of the main points or facts : summary

abstract

3 of 3 verb

ab·stract ab-ˈstrakt

ˈab-ˌstrakt

in sense 3 usually ˈab-ˌstrakt

: to take out : remove

abstract a diamond from a pile of sand

: to consider apart from a particular instance

abstract the idea of roundness from a ball

: to make an abstract of : summarize

: to draw away the attention of

abstractor noun

or abstracter

-ˈstrak-tər

-ˌstrak-

Etymology

Adjective

from Latin abstractus "abstract," from earlier abstrahere "to draw away," from abs-, ab- "from, away" and trahere "to draw" — related to attract, trace entry 1, trace entry 3

Medical Definition

abstract

1 of 2 noun

ab·stract ˈab-ˌstrakt

: a written summary of the key points especially of a scientific paper

: a pharmaceutical preparation made by mixing a powdered solid extract of a vegetable substance with lactose in such proportions that one part of the final product represents two parts of the original drug from which the extract was made

abstract

2 of 2 transitive verb

ab·stract ˈab-ˌstrakt

ab-ˈ

: to make an abstract of

abstractor noun

or abstracter

-tər