What's the difference between abstract and abstruse?

Abstract


Definition:

  • (a.) Withdraw; separate.
  • (a.) Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only; as, abstract truth, abstract numbers. Hence: ideal; abstruse; difficult.
  • (a.) Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete; as, honesty is an abstract word.
  • (a.) Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general as opposed to particular; as, "reptile" is an abstract or general name.
  • (a.) Abstracted; absent in mind.
  • (a.) To withdraw; to separate; to take away.
  • (a.) To draw off in respect to interest or attention; as, his was wholly abstracted by other objects.
  • (a.) To separate, as ideas, by the operation of the mind; to consider by itself; to contemplate separately, as a quality or attribute.
  • (a.) To epitomize; to abridge.
  • (a.) To take secretly or dishonestly; to purloin; as, to abstract goods from a parcel, or money from a till.
  • (a.) To separate, as the more volatile or soluble parts of a substance, by distillation or other chemical processes. In this sense extract is now more generally used.
  • (v. t.) To perform the process of abstraction.
  • (a.) That which comprises or concentrates in itself the essential qualities of a larger thing or of several things. Specifically: A summary or an epitome, as of a treatise or book, or of a statement; a brief.
  • (a.) A state of separation from other things; as, to consider a subject in the abstract, or apart from other associated things.
  • (a.) An abstract term.
  • (a.) A powdered solid extract of a vegetable substance mixed with sugar of milk in such proportion that one part of the abstract represents two parts of the original substance.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) For dipeptides containing the amino terminal residues glycine, alanine and phenylalanine, abstraction of the hydrogen from the carbon adjacent to the peptide nitrogen was the major process leading to the spin-adducts.
  • (2) The death certificates were abstracted; all deaths under age 60 and a 20% sample of deaths 60 and older were examined.
  • (3) They are most commonly described as conduct disordered and hyperactive, appear heir to a variety of deficits in verbal and abstract cognition, and perform more poorly in the academic environment.
  • (4) Actin also exhibited a clear dual wave pattern of transport that coincided well with that of tubulin, indicating that both actin and tubulin were the major components of both groups IV and V.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
  • (5) A mathematical model that abstracts the major features of the vegetative life cycle of Neurosopra crassa has been developed, and the action of selection in this model and various extensions of it is such as to maintain polymorphisms of vegetative incompatibility factors.
  • (6) Scott insisted he was an abstract painter in the way he felt Chardin was too: the pans and fruit were uninteresting in themselves; they were merely "the means of making a picture", which was a study in space, form and colour.
  • (7) Neuropsychological functioning in 90 male and female alcoholics and 65 peer controls was examined using both accuracy and time measures for four basic types of neuropsychological functioning: verbal skills, learning and memory, problem-solving and abstracting, and perceptual-motor skills.
  • (8) 131 cases of the Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) among infants born in the Municipality of Copenhagen during 1956--1971 were analysed on the basis of data collected prospectively by the infant health visitors and abstracted from police reports.
  • (9) Case abstract data are routinely collected by hospital abstracting services, peer review organizations, and some state agencies.
  • (10) 260, 9265-9271] and possibly electron abstraction-water addition.
  • (11) All 546 patients were surveyed prospectively, using the Health Assessment Questionnaire and information abstracted from hospital records.
  • (12) From the patients' performance we make the following theoretical claims: that some arithmetic facts are stored in the form of individual fact representations (e.g., 9 x 4 = 36), whereas other facts are stored in the form of a general rule (e.g., 0 x N = 0); that arithmetic fact retrieval is mediated by abstract internal representations that are independent of the form in which problems are presented or responses are given; that arithmetic facts and calculation procedures are functionally independent; and that calculation algorithms may include special-case procedures that function to increase the speed or efficiency of problem solving.
  • (13) Narrow paths weave among moss-covered ornate arches and towers on the 80-acre site, and huge abstract sculptures and staircases lead nowhere, but up to the sky.
  • (14) On the basis of information abstracted from case histories, 41 patients who had experienced epileptic seizures thought to be due either to treatment with psychiatric drugs or to withdrawal from sedative drugs were compared with a control group of patients.
  • (15) 11 (suppl 14) 331 (abstract)] [14] also indicates that sensitivity to 4-HC can be used to distinguish primitive progenitor cells from committed progenitor cells.
  • (16) Although these differences in kinetics suggest differences in control mechanism(s), the absence of I and T on the surface of NaCl-grown cells suggests that there is also a common regulatory link among H, S and L.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
  • (17) This is an important precedent, because hydrogen abstraction from carbon-10 is a critical step in the lipoxygenase-catalyzed synthesis of 8- and 12-hydroperoxy-eicosatetraenoates (HPETEs) and for the conversion of 5- and 15-HPETEs to leukotrienes.
  • (18) The correlations between Inability to Abstract and Autism before and after those scales that contributed significantly to the Rs had been partialed out also were calculated.
  • (19) For example, population spikes of "short" latency (3-4 or 4-5 ms, depending on the animal) exhibited only facilitation in response to interstimulus intervals of 1-4 ms.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)
  • (20) The inward current caused by nicotine was unaffected by intracellular GTP gamma S.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)

Abstruse


Definition:

  • (a.) Concealed or hidden out of the way.
  • (a.) Remote from apprehension; difficult to be comprehended or understood; recondite; as, abstruse learning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Ed Miliband should be out and proud about his abstruse interests, his Masters in economics, his political obsession, his prioritising of the mental over the physical.
  • (2) Britain's sodden fields mean the debate about climate change is now no longer confined to some abstruse problem affecting glaciers in far-off countries.
  • (3) As if to underline how far leftfield Radiohead have subsequently shifted, it's followed by the instrumental Feral, which in its live incarnation – scattered rhythms overlaid with echoing vocal loops and waves of electronic noise – is arguably the most abstruse and uncommercial piece of music you're ever likely to hear booming around an arena venue.
  • (4) At its best, British public service broadcasting wants to share the best with everyone, it takes topics or themes which may seem abstruse or unapproachable – the science of the solar system, what you can learn about civilisation through physical artefacts – and then brings them to life with such conviction and creativity that they reach deep across a society.
  • (5) Thus the abstruse nomenclature in common use is avoided.
  • (6) Innovative dance music is still being made, but it exists almost entirely out of the realm of the charts: for all its ground-breaking brilliance, there have been few takers among the mainstream record-buyers for the new, deliberately abstruse, genre of "grime".
  • (7) I think the most abstruse one we've put in here is ferkidoodle."
  • (8) The lawyer among them, the ever resourceful Markus C Kerber, probably came up with the abstruse idea of supporting their case by quoting the right to resistance.
  • (9) Filesharing tools have gone from the primitive, easily monitored and abstruse (IRC or the early Napster) to a very easy, attack-resistant architecture that was built in response to entertainment industry attacks.
  • (10) Or perhaps it's just a load of bumwash with wilfully abstruse bells on.
  • (11) In a less abstruse way, Twitter has already shown itself to be a useful conduit for circumventing legal or governmental censorship.
  • (12) The origins of this type of aberrant maternal behavior remain abstruse, as do the long-term psychological effects on the child victims.
  • (13) Shenouda's hundred books and countless sermons untangled abstruse dogma in a straightforward way.
  • (14) If it sounds a little abstruse, by the way, to try to solve the feminist framing of the ancient Greeks, the idea of a sex strike has reappeared more recently, in fiction if not in fact.
  • (15) For the lay person attempting to referee the row, and having to interpret such abstruse concepts as the Gini coefficient and, as Gaffney neatly summarises, whether "the r > g inequality is amplifying the reconcentration trend", illumination is hard to discern.
  • (16) For children about to undergo surgery and for their families, anxiety caused by the abstruse procedure and the child's separation can provoke a crisis.
  • (17) Whereas the effects of Fadenoperation on adduction incomitance are perfectly clear, those on the deviation in primary position still remain very abstruse.
  • (18) This manuscript is concerned with concepts rather than abstruse details or mathematics.
  • (19) Model theory is a branch of mathematics that treats such abstruse questions as "is there another number system, different from 0,1,2, ... that satisfies all the axioms of arithmetic?"