How to Use abstract in a Sentence

abstract

1 of 3 adjective
  • The word “poem” is concrete, the word “poetry” is abstract.
  • Though that would be an abstract place for a ring of that kind.
    Zizi Strater, Peoplemag, 25 May 2023
  • The threats of climate change have long seemed abstract.
    Laura Poppick, Smithsonian, 14 Feb. 2018
  • How can something be too on-the-nose and too abstract at once?
    Darren Franich, EW.com, 11 May 2020
  • But then, the problem was that the fabric of this film is very abstract.
    Patrick Brzeski, The Hollywood Reporter, 28 Oct. 2022
  • We're obsessed with the sunny, beach-y abstract print and the sporty cut.
    Hannah Oh, Seventeen, 13 May 2022
  • But talking about it in the abstract or after the fact is one thing.
    Tribune News Service, oregonlive, 13 Dec. 2021
  • The hope wasn’t so abstract, the future not so dark and the clock not close to running out on them.
    Los Angeles Times, 1 Feb. 2022
  • This is in some ways the most abstract of these fears, but also the most concrete.
    Andrew Pulrang, Forbes, 28 May 2022
  • Too much of the debate over what to do about policing is abstract.
    Alex Pareene, The New Republic, 17 June 2020
  • And for many of us, this concept is still quite abstract and feels so far away.
    Christopher Marquis, Forbes, 17 May 2022
  • Rather than a big abstract painting hung on the wall, the entire wall can be the bold statement.
    Catherine Gaugh, San Diego Union-Tribune, 22 Oct. 2022
  • These abstract art moment pop up in each room, adding ease and comfort to the space.
    House Beautiful, 13 Sep. 2022
  • Much of the learning that goes on in the high school classroom is abstract and abstruse.
    Mike McShane, Forbes, 9 Nov. 2021
  • On the wall was a large, mostly blue abstract painting.
    oregonlive, 17 Mar. 2021
  • The bedspread’s abstract geometries echo those of the large painting on the wall.
    Catherine Hong, Better Homes & Gardens, 10 Aug. 2023
  • Rows of dots sit below a smeary red orb, as if the sun is setting on a land of abstract forms.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 22 Mar. 2024
  • Lip service and abstract promises would no longer do the trick.
    Sandra Matz, Wired, 24 Nov. 2021
  • Given the state of the world, though, this concept is almost abstract.
    Christopher Rosa, Glamour, 17 Dec. 2020
  • But the change that struck me seemed more abstract and internal.
    Kim Stanley Robinson, The New Yorker, 1 May 2020
  • So all of these layered, mostly abstract pictures are in the shape of ovals.
    Mark Jenkins, Washington Post, 22 Nov. 2019
  • But those ideals cannot be realized in the abstract, away from the voting booths.
    Amy Davidson Sorkin, The New Yorker, 20 May 2018
  • The new play area looks something like an abstract sculpture.
    John Delapp, Houston Chronicle, 18 June 2020
  • The study’s abstract and full text are available online.
    Maria Shine Stewart, cleveland, 22 Dec. 2019
  • In this respect, both letters are new forms of abstract art.
    Brian T. Allen, National Review, 19 Aug. 2020
  • Kennedy is bookish and abstract, while Trump is earthy and direct.
    Adam Liptak and Maggie Haberman, BostonGlobe.com, 29 June 2018
  • Shots ranged from urban to abstract, from still-life to soft-focus nude.
    Dennis Sullivan, Daily Southtown, 9 June 2019
  • There are some comedic elements to the short films, with a heavy presence on the abstract and absurd.
    Lisa Deaderick, San Diego Union-Tribune, 27 Jan. 2024
  • With tens of thousands of Russian and Ukrainian soldiers killed over the past two years, the toll can feel overwhelming and abstract.
    Tyler Hicks Marc Santora, New York Times, 22 Mar. 2024
  • Each course at Atomix arrives with a card printed with an abstract image and placed down discreetly by a staffer.
    Bill Addison, Los Angeles Times, 28 Mar. 2024
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abstract

2 of 3 noun
  • Damn the rich in the open and in the abstract, court them in the concrete and secret of darkness.
    Victor Davis Hanson, Arkansas Online, 5 Dec. 2022
  • This is something you can be told, and grasp in the abstract.
    Sebastian Smee, Washington Post, 1 Sep. 2020
  • The species may have lived on until the 1700s, an abstract for the report says.
    Joel Shannon, USA TODAY, 21 June 2018
  • In the abstract, this seems fairly easy for the Democrats to surmount.
    Philip Bump, Washington Post, 18 Dec. 2017
  • But the abstract of this study was just too funny not to share.
    Seriously Science, Discover Magazine, 7 Mar. 2018
  • That is one in nine (or 50 million) jobs, and these are not jobs in the abstract.
    Tom Marchant, Harper's BAZAAR, 27 Mar. 2020
  • Let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract.
    Anne Branigin, The Root, 15 Mar. 2018
  • In the video abstract, Brennan says this seems to be the case for dolphins as well.
    Margaret Osborne, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Jan. 2022
  • Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.
    Southern Living Editors, Southern Living, 5 May 2021
  • The full study isn't available online yet, but the abstract is.
    Chelsea Brasted, NOLA.com, 5 June 2018
  • The source of the depth was 542 meters below Mt. Mantap, the researchers added in the abstract.
    Fox News, 16 Nov. 2019
  • The lesson of Apple is that freedom of the press doesn’t exist in the abstract.
    The Editorial Board, WSJ, 21 June 2021
  • In the abstract, both halves of the contradiction are true.
    Karen Stabiner, New York Times, 17 May 2018
  • There was a little bit of weird abstracts of heat and melting.
    Erica Gonzales, Harper's BAZAAR, 12 Apr. 2019
  • Fishback moved his subject from the abstract to the concrete.
    C.j. Chivers, New York Times, 21 Feb. 2023
  • Out of the 16 artists, three were Black women, one an abstract painter who won through online votes.
    Essence.com, 11 Dec. 2017
  • Below, a roundup of our favorite masks on the market along with costume ideas that range from the abstract to the bold.
    Malia Griggs, SELF, 22 Oct. 2020
  • The lesson is that the human brain deals more readily with the concrete than the abstract.
    James Taranto, WSJ, 18 Jan. 2019
  • Someone had to stand up for Trumpism in the noble abstract.
    Thomas Meaney, Harper's magazine, 20 Jan. 2020
  • In the visual arts, it is contrasted with the abstract or the symbolic.
    Teju Cole, New York Times, 15 Feb. 2018
  • This flesh-eating repertoire is hard enough to stomach in the abstract.
    Marion Renault, The Atlantic, 2 June 2021
  • Andy enjoyed these places in person, but never pined for them in the abstract.
    Ashlea Halpern, Condé Nast Traveler, 29 Jan. 2016
  • But as the opening weeks of the season have shown, complete roster health tends to be an NBA abstract.
    Ira Winderman, sun-sentinel.com, 30 Nov. 2019
  • Most of us understand those words only in the abstract.
    J. B. MacKinnon, The Atlantic, 19 Mar. 2020
  • As a neomodernist, Cortázar has fused the human figure with the abstract.
    Staff Report, Houston Chronicle, 2 Jan. 2018
  • The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.
    Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 22 Aug. 2013
  • Some of Oz’s 15 co-authors on the abstract did not respond to requests for comment.
    Lenny Bernstein and Colby Itkowitz, Anchorage Daily News, 1 Nov. 2022
  • The endless stream of abstracts comes from the preprint server bioRxiv.
    Dalmeet Singh Chawla, Science | AAAS, 15 June 2017
  • That’s what brings union membership out of the abstract and makes its benefits concrete.
    Michael Hiltzik, Los Angeles Times, 22 Nov. 2023
  • The trick is to stick with the patterns in the same color family and layer abstracts, geometrics, florals, or stripes of similar weights.
    Marisa Spyker, Southern Living, 18 Dec. 2023
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abstract

3 of 3 verb
  • Data for the study was abstracted from hospital records.
  • Singer abstracts herself, the artist, from the work too.
    Washington Post, 24 Dec. 2019
  • But QISKit abstracts all those details for the system's users.
    John Timmer, Ars Technica, 16 Mar. 2018
  • It neither moves the plot forward nor wholly abstracts it.
    Lauren Warnecke, chicagotribune.com, 17 Mar. 2018
  • But there are many ways to abstract the data for public awareness.
    Jeremiah Lindemann, Slate Magazine, 10 Aug. 2017
  • Like an outbreak of the measles, abstracted mouse ears are everywhere.
    Blair Kamin, chicagotribune.com, 12 Nov. 2019
  • But the free-spirited Brits brought some wilder, abstracted motifs to the table.
    Jonathan Evans, Esquire, 21 June 2013
  • Their goal is to abstract the ideas while maintaining softness.
    Damon Johnstun, OregonLive.com, 22 Mar. 2018
  • Once again, the woman’s story is consumed and abstracted and diffused into the acrid air.
    Megan Garber, The Atlantic, 24 June 2019
  • The villager-player is abstracted in the form of a ball chasing other balls around a bucolic scene.
    Hart Fowler, Ars Technica, 25 Feb. 2020
  • The new ones are better crafted but further abstracted.
    Carl Wilson, Slate Magazine, 10 July 2017
  • But the roundness of the earth has always been abstracted from human experience.
    Justin E. H. Smith, Harper's Magazine, 21 Aug. 2022
  • Calder’s abstracted dinosaur was installed in 1973 to much fanfare.
    Susan Dunne, courant.com, 9 July 2018
  • Printed on silver gelatin paper and linen, the new work for her solo show seems to strip away and then reconstruct the world around her, abstracting it again and again to create a single print.
    OregonLive.com, 3 Jan. 2018
  • The same process of abstracting away real-world failure can be seen in American conservatism.
    Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, 30 Apr. 2018
  • These are coming with new software platforms that abstract the applications away from the hardware.
    Jonathan M. Gitlin, Ars Technica, 22 Mar. 2023
  • The Senate chamber has the oxygenated, time-abstracting atmosphere of a casino on a slow night, the same woozy contextlessness.
    Charles Homans, New York Times, 13 Mar. 2017
  • From there, determine the context analytics must abstract for each of those sub-domains.
    Amandeep Midha, Forbes, 19 May 2022
  • The data layer would then be able to consume and utilize RAN data in an accessible, open and aligned manner, abstract it and then normalize it.
    Ofir Zemer, Forbes, 24 Sep. 2021
  • 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
  • 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
  • Having med students reading charts and abstracting them is just too slow, and so these tools that use natural language processing to extract the records are very useful.
    Jocelyn Kaiser, Science | AAAS, 21 Dec. 2017
  • But greater use of AI will create a growing number of military encounters in which humans are removed or abstracted from the equation.
    WIRED, 27 July 2023
  • Gliese is often at her best when she features closely cropped floral compositions that are slightly abstracted in terms of both form and color.
    Mike Giuliano, Howard County Times, 18 Aug. 2017
  • And figures like Grace Hopper were formative in abstracting software from hardware — fomenting its emergence as a field in its own right.
    Stephen Phillips, San Francisco Chronicle, 1 June 2018
  • 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
  • Abstracting from life was also striking the art world during this time, with abstract expressionism giving way to color-field painting and pop art.
    Gayle Clemans, The Seattle Times, 15 May 2017
  • In fact, the mathematical toy models that physicists use are good at abstracting things like the relationship between species.
    Chris Lee, Ars Technica, 27 July 2019
  • Google can abstract an enormous amount of information from unstructured text.
    Andrew Muchmore, STAT, 27 Mar. 2020
  • Gang’s design shares the methodical madness and off-kilter fragility of those designs, both abstracting and emulating the process of natural change.
    Curbed, 25 Apr. 2023

Some of 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.

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