Extraction

How to spell extraction

10 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce extraction

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does extraction mean?

1. nounThe act or process of drawing or pulling something out, often with effort or care.
2. nounThe removal of a tooth from its socket by a dentist or surgeon.
3. nounThe process of separating a substance from a mixture or raw material, as in industry or chemistry.
4. nounA person's family origin or ancestral descent.

Extraction in a sentence

• The safe extraction of the trapped miners took several hours.

• The dentist recommended extraction of the impacted wisdom tooth.

• The factory specialises in the extraction of oil from sunflower seeds.

• He is a banker of Scottish extraction now living in Toronto.

• Data extraction from the old system was slower than expected.

• She felt little pain during the extraction thanks to the local anaesthetic.

Where does extraction come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word descends from the Latin verb extrahere, formed from ex, meaning 'out', and trahere, meaning 'to draw' or 'to pull'. Its past participle extractus gave rise to the late Latin noun extractio, the literal sense of which was the act of drawing something out. English took the word through French in the late medieval period, when it was used for pulling things out by force and, a little later, for distilling or drawing essences from plants and minerals. The same trahere root sits inside a whole family of familiar English words, including 'tractor' (a machine that pulls), 'attract', 'contract' and 'subtract', and recognising that shared 'tract' core is the easiest way to keep the spelling steady. By the seventeenth century it had also acquired the figurative sense of one's origin or descent, as in being 'of Irish extraction'.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• tract (from Latin trahere: to draw or pull)
• -ion (noun of action)