abstract

1 of 3

adjective

ab·​stract ab-ˈstrakt  ˈab-ˌstrakt 

1

a

: relating to or involving general ideas or qualities rather than an actual object, person, etc.

abstract concepts such as love and hate

Children progress from more concrete to more abstract thinking …

—Zach Gottlieb

… unlike an individual, a state is an abstract entity with no mind or thoughts.

—Amanda Ghahremani et al.

b

: difficult to understand : abstruse

abstract problems

Another piece of this that might seem a little abstract is how these drugs actually get into the body.

—Julia Sullivan

c

: insufficiently factual : formal

possessed only an abstract right

… the Commission correctly observes that an agency may, if authorized by statute, issue an advisory opinion or abstract declaration without regard to the existence of an actual controversy.

—Federal Register

2

: naming a quality apart from an object

the word poem is concrete, poetry is abstract

3

a

: dealing with a subject in its theoretical aspects

… real-world math … enables better understanding of abstract mathematical concepts when they are introduced later.

—Laura Grace Weldon

b

: impersonal, detached

… the abstract compassion of a surgeon …

—Time

4

fine arts : relating to or creating art with little or no intent to produce a realistic representation or tell a story : nonobjective

abstract painting/sculpture

an abstract artist

see also abstract expressionism

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 

1

: a summary or abridgment (as of a book, a scientific article, or a legal document)

The findings were presented as an abstract, and therefore have not been … published in full yet.

—Isabella Cueto

2

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

Finance is all about the tension between simplicity and complexity, the material and the abstract.

—Sophia Nguyen

3

: an abstract composition or creation in art

… these early 20th century abstracts include photographs, paintings and prints …

—Anne Dunlap

abstract

3 of 3

verb

ab·​stract ab-ˈstrakt  ˈab-ˌstrakt 

in sense 3 usually

ˈab-ˌstrakt 

abstracted; abstracting; abstracts

transitive verb

1

: to make a summary or abstract of : summarize

abstract an academic paper

Having med students reading charts and abstracting them is just too slow …

—Jocelyn Kaiser

2

: to draw away the attention of

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

—James Joyce

3

: steal, purloin

She abstracted important documents from the safe.

4

: remove, separate

abstract water from wells

The complexity has been abstracted away, hidden by a more user-friendly interface.

—Amit Zavery

5

: to think about or understand by separating general qualities, concepts, etc. from specific objects or instances

… they know how it works … and [have] been able to abstract the rules as they go along.

—Craig Wright, quoted in Canberra (Australia) Times

… for Hegel and his followers, the task of art is to abstract the world into pure concept …

—Tom McCarthy

intransitive verb

: to abstract something

… we're able to generalize, to abstract, to see the forest rather than the individual tree.

—Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, quoted in Globe & Mail (Toronto, Canada)

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.”

Synonyms of abstract

Adjective

• theoretical
• metaphysical
• conceptual

Noun

• summary
• outline

Verb

• distract
• divert
• throw off
• detract

Examples of abstract in a Sentence

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

Recent Examples on the Web

Adjective

Attributes that are magical, abstract, woo-woo. —Literary Hub, 3 Nov. 2025

Point out trails, prevailing winds, terrain funnels, food sources, buck sign — things that might seem obvious to you but might be abstract to them. —The Editors, Outdoor Life, 30 Oct. 2025

Noun

Though her early figurative sculptures like The Great Blessing of Abraham and Angel of Joshua are overt in their religious references, her abstract Burntworks feel no less reverent. —Grace Edquist, Vogue, 23 Oct. 2025

One of the only reports, an abstract from researchers at the University of Miami and Vanderbilt University that was published in 2010 and presented at an international meeting for autism research, looked at autism among the Amish from Indiana and Ohio. —Mary Kekatos, ABC News, 14 Oct. 2025

Verb

The girl is, instead, abstracted into various body parts: a pair of legs dangling from a toilet, or a belly from which a feeding tube protrudes—an image that emphasizes her near-umbilical dependence on Linda. —Justin Chang, New Yorker, 9 Oct. 2025

The personal, human impact is gruesome, and always worth re-centering when things get abstracted into statistics and profits. —James Folta, Literary Hub, 22 Sep. 2025

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," of uncertain origin

Note: The etymology of trahere beyond Latin is problematic. It would require a verbal base *treg^h-, a shape that is not allowable by Indo-European root structure constraints (voiceless stops cannot co-occur with voiced aspirated stops, though there may be exceptions if a sonorant is interposed). However, aside from loans and expressive formations, Latin words do not begin with dr-, so it is conceivable that initial dr- in an inherited root could have shifted to tr-. The verb trahere then invites comparison with Germanic *dragan- "to draw, pull" (see draw entry 1), virtually identical in meaning, though this presupposes a further change, since *dragan- must descend from Indo-European *d^hrog^h-. Thus *d^hrag^heti > *drag^heti (by dissimulation of the first aspirate) > trahit (3rd person singular present tense). (See M. Weiss, Outline of the Historical and Comparative Grammar of Latin, 2nd edition [Ann Arbor, 2020], pp. 169, 176.) Alternatively, trahere has been compared with Old Irish tethraig "ebbed, receded," with nominal correspondents tráig "beach, shore," Middle Welsh trei "ebb, draining," all presupposing a root *treHg^h- or *trag^h-. (See S. Schumacher, Die keltischen Primärverben [Innsbruck, 2004], pp. 635-36; his hypothesis is seconded by M. de Vaan, Etymological Dictionary of Latin and the Other Italic Languages [Leiden, 2008].) M. Weis, on the other hand, would assign this etymon to *treg^h- "run" (whence Old English þrǣgan "to run," Gothic biþragjan)—see "Limited Latin Grassmann's Law: Do We Need It?," Vina Diem Celebrent: Studies in Linguistics and Philology in Honor of Brent Vine (Ann Arbor, 2018), pp. 438-47. See further P. Schrijver, The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Latin (Amsterdam, 1991), pp. 188-89, where an attempt is made to explain the a of trahere by the assumption of a laryngeal in the root.

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

15th century, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Verb

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

Phrases Containing abstract

• abstract algebra
• abstract expressionism
• abstract of title
• in the abstract

Rhymes for abstract

• attacked
• attract
• contact
• contract
• detract
• distract
• enact
• exact
• extract
• hijacked
• impact
• intact

Kids Definition

abstract

1 of 3 adjective

ab·​stract ab-ˈstrakt  ˈab-ˌstrakt 

1

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

"honesty" is an abstract word

2

: difficult to understand : hard

abstract problems

3

: 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

1

: to take out : remove

abstract a diamond from a pile of sand

2

: to consider apart from a particular instance

abstract the idea of roundness from a ball

3

: to make an abstract of : summarize

4

: 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 

1

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

2

: 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 

Legal Definition

abstract

noun

ab·​stract ˈab-ˌstrakt 

1

: a summary of a legal document

2

: abstract of title

abstract

ab-ˈstrakt, ˈab-ˌstrakt 

transitive verb