How to Use abstraction in a Sentence

abstraction

noun
  • She gazed out the window in abstraction.
  • And they were made in the 1960s, a time when abstraction reigned.
    — BostonGlobe.com, 21 May 2021
  • Klee opened up for me not just the world of abstraction, but the world of art.
    — Lance Esplund, WSJ, 23 Nov. 2018
  • But in those days, one had to love for the sake of some abstraction, against the backdrop of it.
    — Sarah Vitali, Harper's magazine, 10 May 2019
  • The atomic bomb for us at the time, with Lisa in the second grade, and me in the first, was just an abstraction.
    — David Sedaris, The New Yorker, 17 Mar. 2018
  • 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
  • At the same time, the patterns, the textures, and the jostling forms pull us into abstraction.
    — Cate McQuaid, BostonGlobe.com, 23 May 2018
  • 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
  • Our neighbors — and the rest of the world — become abstractions.
    — Jim Beckerman, USA TODAY, 26 Oct. 2019
  • 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
  • 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
  • As a measure of time, a year can seem like an abstraction.
    — Time, 23 Dec. 2020
  • My friend David Schutter painted the large work on the left, an abstraction of a French landscape.
    — Theaster Gates, WSJ, 8 Oct. 2018
  • American art was swept up in the post-war rage for abstraction.
    — Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2022
  • There’s a sweetness in living in dreams and abstractions, but there’s a joy in living in your own body, too.
    — Claire Comstock-Gay, The Cut, 18 Sep. 2017
  • 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
  • Traces of Bell Labs technologies were evident at the gallery, though they were masked by the gloss and abstraction of art.
    — Elizabeth Stinson, WIRED, 10 May 2018
  • 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
  • But the sum total of its gliding abstractions is a mite brainless.
    — Michael Phillips, chicagotribune.com, 7 Sep. 2017
  • Artists in Congo tend to deal with real life, rather than abstractions.
    — The Economist, 14 Sep. 2017
  • Here all are painted an unlikely shade of soft green, which, with the bracing blue sky, gives the setting the force of abstraction.
    — Roberta Smith, New York Times, 12 Sep. 2019
  • From across the room the pieces look like flat, multicolored abstractions.
    — Dmitry Samarov, Chicago Reader, 6 Sep. 2017
  • 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
  • There are works depicting her ex-lover as a bloody abstraction pouring into her loins.
    — Tessa Solomon, ARTnews.com, 28 Mar. 2025
  • As LeCun points out, these representations must be at the right level of abstraction to make useful predictions for the task at hand.
    — Jason D. Greenblatt, MSNBC Newsweek, 2 Apr. 2025

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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