How to Use abstraction in a Sentence

abstraction

noun
Definition of abstractionnext
Synonyms for abstractionnext
  • She gazed out the window in abstraction.
  • Zero’s latest surprise may be in just how well the brain learns to handle that abstraction.
    — Michaela Maya-Mrschtik, Scientific American, 21 Oct. 2024
  • For most people, the price-equals-wealth fallacy is only an economic abstraction.
    — William Baldwin, Forbes, 20 Mar. 2021
  • Mehretu kept moving, and in the process forged a new sort of decolonial abstraction right inside the tradition of Western art.
    — Jason Farago, New York Times, 25 Mar. 2021
  • The others consider color in motion, space age abstraction, optics and experimental film.
    — Christopher Knight, Los Angeles Times, 29 Oct. 2024
  • The pension system is where that abstraction becomes a reality for ordinary Chinese people.
    — Joseph C. Sternberg, WSJ, 11 Mar. 2021
  • For his part, Burgess says the team is taking pains to balance artistic and documentary elements and to avoid clouding the historical figures in abstraction.
    — Washington Post, 7 Apr. 2021
  • For others, though, abstraction was a radical re-envisioning of form and identity, and enabled Black artists to upset the very categories of race that had oppressed them.
    — Harper's BAZAAR, 26 Feb. 2021
  • And they were made in the 1960s, a time when abstraction reigned.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 21 May 2021
  • The idea of colds as a little trial for the soul is an abstraction.
    — Addison Del Mastro, The Week, 16 Feb. 2022
  • These make sense in the world they're set in, with little abstraction.
    — Chuong Nguyen and Samuel Axon, Ars Technica, 24 Mar. 2023
  • For most of us, the intense drought that is gripping most of the state is an abstraction.
    — Robert Gehrke, The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 May 2021
  • For most of us, this was how the crisis was viewed - from the abstraction of space, a mutation of the map.
    — Henry Wismayer, Anchorage Daily News, 30 Aug. 2022
  • For most of us, this was how the crisis was viewed — from the abstraction of space, a mutation of the map.
    — Henry Wismayer, Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2022
  • American art was swept up in the post-war rage for abstraction.
    — Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2022
  • The effects of climate change are no longer an abstraction.
    — Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2021
  • The Maryland native varies the view with close-ups of water and plants, some of which approach abstraction.
    — Washington Post, 23 Apr. 2021
  • The abstraction of genre is stripped away to favor the fight-or-flight behavior that slasher movies try to capture in the first place.
    — Wired, 10 July 2022
  • In those moments, his words seemed like an abstraction.
    — Chris Megerian, Vanessa Gera and Aamer Madhani, Anchorage Daily News, 27 Mar. 2022
  • The experts are too deep in the weeds, while policy makers seem lost in abstractions.
    — Yuval Levin, WSJ, 21 Dec. 2023
  • The paintings run the gamut of abstraction, from moody to exuberant.
    — Kriston Capps, Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2023
  • Af Klint, for those keeping score, seems to have beaten Kandinsky to the punch of modern abstraction by five years.
    — Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2021
  • Drawn to abstraction, Villa had a fair amount of success early on.
    — Los Angeles Times, 31 Aug. 2022
  • The move over the previous decade from abstraction to figuration among the avant-garde.
    — Eric Gibson, WSJ, 15 Nov. 2023
  • The installation’s skein of lines might thus be read as mere abstraction, like a Jackson Pollock on the grass.
    — Blake Gopnik, New York Times, 18 Aug. 2023
  • Kevin Durant, to them, is just an abstraction, a guy on the TV, a figment of their imaginations.
    — New York Times, 2 June 2021
  • Vengeance here is, thrillingly, more than an abstraction.
    — Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Aug. 2024
  • While a maestro of abstraction, Shannon was also a keen builder.
    — IEEE Spectrum, 14 Apr. 2023
  • For people who are middle class or affluent, the day-to-day lives of people who are poor is an abstraction.
    — jsonline.com, 6 Oct. 2022
  • Yet, strangely, that very sense of abstraction, far from crystallizing over time in the course of the action, only works to hollow the movie out.
    — Richard Brody, The New Yorker, 6 Mar. 2023

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abstraction.' 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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