What's the difference between abstract and literal?

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)

Literal


Definition:

  • (a.) According to the letter or verbal expression; real; not figurative or metaphorical; as, the literal meaning of a phrase.
  • (a.) Following the letter or exact words; not free.
  • (a.) Consisting of, or expressed by, letters.
  • (a.) Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative; matter-of fast; -- applied to persons.
  • (n.) Literal meaning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They are just literally lying.” In August Microsoft severed its ties, saying Alec’s stance on climate change and several other issues “conflicted directly with Microsoft’s values”.
  • (2) Estimated fluid consumption dropped from 10 liters to 4 liters daily and incidents of hyponatremia decreased by 62%.
  • (3) Resting plasma epinephrine and norepinephrine levels were 13.1 and 2.1 nmol liter-1 for the marine toad (Bufo marinus).
  • (4) And we literally had hundreds of thousands of them."
  • (5) Standard additions are unnecessary; Pt concentrations are read from a calibration chart of peak heights, which is linear up to 1.6 mg per liter.
  • (6) Communication issues in obtaining organ donation consent were examined, with particular focus on what are literally life-and-death decisions.
  • (7) It could still be terrorism but it looks as if the aircraft went out of control because the controls were literally burning up.
  • (8) A novel vector was employed which permits rapid and highly efficient cleavage of the GST fusion protein yielding 10 mg of purified PurH product per liter of bacterial culture.
  • (9) You literally never see that at political rallies, though obviously at Tea Party ones they are there all the time."
  • (10) An empirical rate expression was developed from experimental data which led to a prediction that the natural rate of oxidation in the ocean is about 0.023 micromoles of As(III) per liter each year.
  • (11) A technology for preparation of purified concentrates of rabies virus has been developed permitting to use simultaneously dozens of liters of tissue culture virus-containing fluid for the preparation of a concentrate.
  • (12) The maximum effect was obtained with 10(-7) molar gibberellic acid, whereas concentrations greater than 5 x 10(-7) mole per liter were inhibitory.
  • (13) Years ahead of its time, it saw each song presented theatrically, the musicians concealed in the wings (although Bowie said that they kept creeping on to the stage, literally unable to resist the spotlight) and with Bowie performing on a cherry-picker and on a giant hand, both of which kept breaking down.
  • (14) Some women attended the protest wearing jeans and T-shirts, while others took the mission of reclaiming the word "slut" – one of the stated objectives of the movement – more literally and turned out in overtly provocative fishnets and stilettos.
  • (15) But nobody got the reference and "the next day it was literally on CNN".
  • (16) 1.57pm BST Lap 36: Punchy stuff from Jules Bianchi up to 13th, literally bumping his way through Kobayashi on the inside.
  • (17) The majority of children came from low socio-economic homes (61%) with mostly illiterate or semi-literate mothers.
  • (18) As compared with the normoglycemic patients, the patients with hypoglycemia had elevated median plasma concentrations of glucagon (44 vs. 11 pmol per liter; P = 0.001), epinephrine (3400 vs. 1500 pmol per liter; P = 0.012), norepinephrine (7500 vs. 2900 pmol per liter; P = 0.002), and lactate (3.5 vs. 2.1 mmol per liter; P = 0.020) and similar alanine and beta-hydroxybutyrate concentrations.
  • (19) Finally, poliovirus experimentally seeded in 20 liters of tape water was recovered from Johns-Manville D79-Johns-Manville D39 or Johns-Manville D79-Filterite 0.45 micron 142-mm filter combinations was a efficiencies of 86 and 85%, respectively.
  • (20) Results concerning existence and uniqueness of equilibria, stability of the equilibria, and boundedness of solutions suggest that "compensatory" systems might not be compensatory in the literal sense.