shrinkage

noun

shrink·​age ˈshriŋ-kij 

 especially Southern  ˈsriŋ-

1

: the act or process of shrinking

2

a

: the loss in weight of livestock during shipment and in the process of preparing the meat for consumption

b

: the loss of goods especially by theft

inventory shrinkage

3

: the amount lost by shrinkage

Synonyms

• decrease
• reduction
• dent
• decline
• drop

Examples of shrinkage in a Sentence

The shrinkage in contributions is significant.

a shrinkage of 10 percent

the shrinkage of the polar ice caps

Recent Examples on the Web

Dryer balls can shorten drying time, reducing the amount of shrinkage. —Brandee Gruener, Southern Living, 21 Oct. 2025

Men showed a faster rate of brain shrinkage across more regions than women. —Khloe Quill, FOXNews.com, 21 Oct. 2025

Fed Chair Powell mostly reiterated the case for dropping short-term rates toward neutral while also musing about halting the shrinkage of the Fed balance sheet soon. —Michael Santoli, CNBC, 14 Oct. 2025

Multiverse’s core business is compressing open-source LLMs with such extreme shrinkage that most of its versions can run on CPUs, or central processing units, of the kind used in smartphones and regular computers, rather than GPUs, or graphics processing units. —Vivienne Walt, Fortune, 9 Oct. 2025

Word History

First Known Use

1800, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Rhymes for shrinkage

• linkage

Kids Definition

shrinkage

noun

shrink·​age ˈshriŋ-kij 

: the amount by which something shrinks or becomes less