Abstraction

How to spell abstraction

11 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce abstraction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does abstraction mean?

1. nounA general idea or quality considered apart from any specific object or instance.
2. nounArt that uses shape, colour and form rather than recognisable images of real objects.
3. nounThe act of taking or drawing something away, such as water from a source.

Abstraction in a sentence

• Justice is an abstraction that lawyers debate in concrete cases.

• The gallery devoted a whole room to mid-century abstraction.

• The licence limits the abstraction of water from the river each summer.

• The professor warned that the theory remained an abstraction with no practical test.

• Her later canvases moved from portraits into pure abstraction.

• Excessive abstraction of groundwater lowered the village wells.

Where does abstraction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word descends from the Latin abstractio, a noun built on the verb abstrahere, which literally meant 'to draw away' or 'to pull off'. That verb joined the prefix abs-, meaning 'away from', to trahere, meaning 'to drag or pull', the same root that gives us 'tractor', 'attract', and 'extract'. The idea was that the mind could 'draw away' a quality from a particular thing and consider it on its own, separated from the object that carried it. English took the word in the late Middle Ages, partly through Old French, first in this philosophical sense of considering an idea apart from concrete examples. Later senses, including the act of removing something and the modern non-representational style in art, all trace back to that original picture of pulling a quality away. Remembering the tract root, the same one pulling through 'tractor', helps fix the central -tract- of the spelling.

How the word is built

• abs- (away from)
• tract (from trahere: to draw or pull)
• -ion (noun of action or state)