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

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

Materials could withstand 20 times more pressure Yiming Ji, the first author of the study, also underlined that their materials could withstand 20 times more pressure compared to those produced with previous methods, while exhibiting only 20% shrinkage versus 60-90%. —Prabhat Ranjan Mishra, Interesting Engineering, 9 Oct. 2025

Prostatic Atrophy Prostatic atrophy refers to the shrinkage or deterioration of the prostate gland. —Md Published, PEOPLE, 2 Oct. 2025

The designer promotes it as being as soft as cashmere, but with no shrinkage. —Catherine Salfino, Sourcing Journal, 26 Sep. 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