Other forms: abstracts, abstracted, abstracting
Something abstract exists as an idea and nowhere else — there is nothing to point at, photograph, or put in a box. Justice, freedom, the number seven, next Thursday.
Abstract is the other half of concrete, and the pair is how it gets taught: a chair is concrete, comfort is abstract. It slides easily into a complaint. An abstract argument, a discussion held in the abstract, is one with no examples in it and nothing at stake. Art took the word for pictures made of shape and colour rather than a recognisable thing — an abstract painting. And in academic writing an abstract is a noun: the short paragraph at the top of a paper summing up the whole study, the part everyone reads and most people stop at. The stress shifts with the job — ABstract for the adjective and the noun, abSTRACT for the verb that means to draw something out.
1adjectiveadjExisting as an idea rather than as a thing you can touch.~48%
“Beauty is an abstract idea and nobody agrees on it.”
synonyms: theoretical, conceptual
2adjectiveartOf art: made of shape and colour rather than recognisable objects.~40%
“The top floor of the gallery is all abstract painting.”
3nounsummaryThe short summary at the top of an academic paper.~10%
“Read the abstract before you order the whole paper.”
4verbdrawTo draw something out of a larger thing.~2%
“The report abstracts the main findings from ten studies.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 184 sentences found in the wild and placed 163 of them on a sense (21 were unclear) — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
ab-STRACT → a TRACK
A rope drags the whole barn off across the field, leaving two deep tracks in the mud. Where it stood there is a clean pale square of flat grass. The barn is a mile away. The square is all you have left to point at.
hooks ontotrack
Latin abstrahō meant to draw away: abs, away, plus trahō, to pull. An abstract idea has been pulled off the thing it came from — take the redness away from every red object and what is left is the idea of red, with nothing under it. The same trahō is pulling inside tractor, extract and subtract.
Middle English
abstract
English, today
abstract
Built from
From Middle English abstract. From Middle English abstract, borrowed from Latin abstractus, perfect passive participle of abstrahō (“draw away”), formed from abs- (“away”) + trahō (“to pull, draw”). The verbal sense is first attested in 1542.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA