abstraction
noun
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From its roots, abstraction should mean basically "something pulled or drawn away". So abstract art is art that has moved away from painting objects of the ordinary physical world in order to show something beyond it. Theories are often abstractions; so a theory about economics, for instance, may "pull back" to take a broad view that somehow explains all of economics (but maybe doesn't end up explaining any of it very successfully). An abstract of a medical or scientific article is a one-paragraph summary of its contents—that is, the basic findings "pulled out" of the article.
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Examples of abstraction in a Sentence
Quanta Magazine, 18 Nov. 2024
Studying under the Russian-French sculptor Ossip Zadkine in New York inspired her to embrace internationalism and abstraction.
—Shameekia Shantel Johnson, ARTnews.com, 4 Nov. 2024
For young children, who do not generally experience the world through a metalanguage of explanations and abstractions, this is even more apparent.
—Deborah Treisman, The New Yorker, 3 Nov. 2024
The most effective organizations will be those that can build abstractions to hide this complexity from their developers while leveraging it to create more resilient, scalable and innovative systems.
—Ramasankar Molleti, Forbes, 1 Nov. 2024
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Cite this Entry
“Abstraction.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstraction. Accessed 26 Nov. 2024.
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abstraction
noun
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