(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)
Metaphor
Definition:
(n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.
Example Sentences:
(1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
(3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
(4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
(5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
(6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
(7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
(8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
(9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
(10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
(11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
(12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
(13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
(14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
(15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
(16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
(17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
(18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
(19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
(20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.