(v. t.) To draw back; to draw up or shorten; as, the cat can retract its claws; to retract a muscle.
(v. t.) To withdraw; to recall; to disavow; to recant; to take back; as, to retract an accusation or an assertion.
(v. t.) To take back,, as a grant or favor previously bestowed; to revoke.
(v. i.) To draw back; to draw up; as, muscles retract after amputation.
(v. i.) To take back what has been said; to withdraw a concession or a declaration.
(n.) The pricking of a horse's foot in nailing on a shoe.
Example Sentences:
(1) Brain damage may be followed by a number of dynamic events including reactive synaptogenesis, rerouting of axons to unusual locations and altered axon retraction processes.
(2) Tottenham Hotspur’s £400m redevelopment of White Hart Lane could include a retractable grass pitch as the club explores the possibility of hosting a new NFL franchise.
(3) Any MP who claims this is not statutory regulation is a liar, and should be forced to retract and apologise, or face a million pound fine.
(4) During the first 15 to 20 min of metamorphosis the larval arms are retracted and resorbed into the aboral surface of the juvenile.
(5) • Written, oral and video statements of self-incrimination and self-renunciation by the detainees, apparently induced by the authorities, have been released through official media channels (for example, lawyer Zhang Kai was induced to make such a statement, which he later retracted).
(6) Duane's retraction syndrome is a congenital eye movement disorder characterized by a deficiency of abduction, mild limitation of adduction, with retraction and narrowing of the palpebral fissure on attempted adduction.
(7) Axonal trees display differential growth during development or regeneration; that is, some branches stop growing and often retract while other branches continue to grow and form stable synaptic connections.
(8) She said she was not worried by Rubio’s one-time position on his immigration bill, later retracted, that he could not support reform if it included citizenship for gay couples.
(9) Useful differential morphological criteria can be: star-like or transverse ring-shaped profile of isolated ulcerations, tubular ileocolic junction with retracted cecum and open valve, and uniformity of lesion in the comprehensive picture of the clinical case.
(10) Both require more brain retraction and have greater risk to the facial nerve than the translabyrinthine approach.
(11) Unlike posterior tympanoplasty, this technique makes it possible to meticulously remove the osteitic bone invariably found in the facial recess when there is infection of the retraction pocket.
(12) In the third patient laparotomy was applied owing to the bleeding from the retracted, cut uterine artery.
(13) Because of laboratory and clinical observation that recurrent nerve paralysis retracts the involved vocal cord from the midline, it was proposed that deliberate section of the recurrent nerve would improve the vocal quality of patients with spastic dysphonia.
(14) Seven to 30 days following axotomy the volume of the hypoglossal nucleus was significantly diminished, undoubtedly reflecting dendritic retraction (P less than 0.05).
(15) Contacts resulting in collapse and retraction were often accompanied by a rapid and transient burst of lamellipodial activity along the neurite 30-50 microns proximal to the retracting growth cone.
(16) At three, six, and twelve months after the first operation the development of retraction pockets was also studied.
(17) The anchoring wire can also be retracted and repositioned.
(18) The right occipital lobe is retracted laterally from the falx cerebri.
(19) These experiments demonstrated that accessory abducens is a primary controller of eye retraction through its axons to retractor bulbi.
(20) A commercial system for producing retracted compensators has been adapted to suit local needs, and is evaluated here.
Unsay
Definition:
(v. t.) To recant or recall, as what has been said; to refract; to take back again; to make as if not said.
Example Sentences:
(1) Privatisation would destroy that at a stroke.” Trevor Phillips says the unsayable about race and multiculturalism Read more The government is considering privatisation as one of a number of options for Channel 4, which is commercially run but owned by the state.
(2) And the oath of “believing in freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from abuse …” would arguably entail, from the prime minister, her cabinet, her party and her Ukip fellow travellers, a rather more rigorous rejection of Islamophobia, so that Muslim women in shopping centres didn’t have to be dragged along the ground by their hijabs in a newly emboldened climate of “saying the unsayable”.
(3) Comedy wants you to say the unsayable; the celebrity industry would rather you didn’t.
(4) Where it was possible at last for Egyptians to stand side by side and say what was previously unsayable.
(5) That No comes from deep within – and he can never unsay it.
(6) Lessing delivers the occasional blast of dry humour, but it is her intellectual honesty, her ability to say the unsayable, which has made her famous.
(7) "Germans would probably do themselves a service by leaving the euro, but this is something that is unsayable in German politics."
(8) Many of these are people with posh names, liberal-baiting sayers of the unsayable – the “unsayable” generally just being routine racism, sexism and idiocy.
(9) For a potential £400,000 he was prepared to say the unsayable.
(10) It can be an interesting exercise to think the otherwise unsayable.
(11) The unsayable always has that strange cliff-edge allure, and quite a few comedians forage their material in no-go areas.
(12) "I like working in an environment of creative confidence and respect – where nothing is unsayable, so long as you find the right way to say it."
(13) One council leader I met dared openly to say the unsayable – there was no initiative on benefit nor incentive to work that could break the cycle of welfare dependency because there was no local worthwhile work.
(14) Mindful of the damage his win-at-all-costs moves had wrought, Netanyahu lost no time trying to unsay what he had said.
(15) His unsayable thing about women is that they [we] all want to be ravished.
(16) There are things you can never unsay, that you cannot say and still remain friends, and that would have been one of them.
(17) Here was a writer who said the unsayable, thought the unthinkable, and fearlessly put it down there, in all its raw emotional and intellectual chaos.
(18) Joan provoked incredulity mixed with a weird kind of rapture, as she said the unsayable – and they doubled over in laughter again and again.
(19) As Ken Clarke did in 1990 when his colleagues ummed and ahed and allowed themselves to be browbeaten by Margaret Thatcher and her praetorian guard, so Purnell has said the previously unsayable - that the prime minister must go.
(20) I was cited everywhere as having said the unsayable: that it is possible for a woman to dislike her children, even to regret having brought them into the world.