abstract

American  

[ab-strakt, ab-strakt, ab-strakt, ab-strakt, ab-strakt] / æbˈstrækt, ˈæb strækt, ˈæb strækt, æbˈstrækt, ˈæb strækt /

adjective

1. thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances.

   an abstract idea.

2. expressing a quality or characteristic apart from any specific object or instance, as justice, poverty, and speed.

3. not applied or practical; theoretical.

   abstract science.

4. difficult to understand; abstruse.

   abstract speculations.

5. Fine Arts.

   1. of or relating to the formal aspect of art, emphasizing lines, colors, generalized or geometrical forms, etc., especially with reference to their relationship to one another.

   2. Often Abstract pertaining to the nonrepresentational art styles of the 20th century.

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noun

abstracts plural

1. a summary of a text, scientific article, document, speech, etc.; epitome.

2. something that concentrates in itself the essential qualities of anything more extensive or more general, or of several things; essence.

3. an idea or term considered apart from some material basis or object.

4. an abstract work of art.

verb (used with object)

abstracts, present (3rd person singular) abstracted, past participle, past abstracting present participle

1. to make an abstract of; summarize.

2. to draw or take away; remove.

3. to divert or draw away the attention of.

4. to steal.

5. to consider as a general quality or characteristic apart from specific objects or instances.

   to abstract the notions of time, space, and matter.

idioms

1. abstract away from, to omit from consideration.

2. in the abstract, without reference to a specific object or instance; in theory.

   beauty in the abstract.

abstract British  

adjective

1. having no reference to material objects or specific examples; not concrete

2. not applied or practical; theoretical

3. hard to understand; recondite; abstruse

4. denoting art characterized by geometric, formalized, or otherwise nonrepresentational qualities

5. defined in terms of its formal properties

   an abstract machine

6. philosophy (of an idea) functioning for some empiricists as the meaning of a general term

   the word ``man'' does not name all men but the abstract idea of manhood

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noun

1. a condensed version of a piece of writing, speech, etc; summary

2. an abstract term or idea

3. an abstract painting, sculpture, etc

4. without reference to specific circumstances or practical experience

verb

1. to think of (a quality or concept) generally without reference to a specific example; regard theoretically

2. to form (a general idea) by abstraction

3. (also intr) to summarize or epitomize

4. to remove or extract

5. euphemistic to steal

Other Word Forms

Derived Forms

• abstracter
  noun
• abstractness
  noun
• nonabstractness
  noun
• superabstractness
  noun
• overabstract
  verb (used with object)
• nonabstract
  adjective
• preabstract
  adjective
• superabstract
  adjective
• abstractly
  adverb
• nonabstractly
  adverb
• superabstractly
  adverb

Inflected Forms

Nouns

• abstracts
  plural

Participles

• abstracting
  present
• abstracted
  past

Conjugated Forms

Present

• abstract
  simple
• abstracts
  simple
• have abstracted
  perfect
• has abstracted
  perfect
• am abstracting
  progressive
• are abstracting
  progressive
• is abstracting
  progressive
• have been abstracting
  perfect progressive
• has been abstracting
  perfect progressive

Past

• abstracted
  simple
• had abstracted
  perfect
• was abstracting
  progressive
• were abstracting
  progressive
• had been abstracting
  perfect progressive

Future

• will abstract
  simple
• will have abstracted
  perfect
• will be abstracting
  progressive
• will have been abstracting
  perfect progressive

Etymology

Origin of abstract

First recorded in 1400–50; late Middle English: “withdrawn from worldly interests,” from Latin abstractus “drawn off” (past participle of abstrahere ). See abs-, tract ¹

Explanation

Use the adjective abstract for something that is not a material object or is general and not based on specific examples. Abstract is from a Latin word meaning "pulled away, detached," and the basic idea is of something detached from physical, or concrete, reality. It is frequently used of ideas, meaning that they don't have a clear applicability to real life, and of art, meaning that it doesn't pictorially represent reality. It is also used as a noun, especially in the phrase "in the abstract" (a joke has a person laying down a new sidewalk saying "I like little boys in the abstract, but not in the concrete"), and as a verb (accented on the second syllable), meaning "to remove."

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

abstract abstracts abstracted abstracting

According to an abstract presented at a medical meeting, there were improvements based on the Disease Activity Index, a common score for assessing the severity of ulcerative colitis.

From MarketWatch ● Jul. 23, 2026

Neill’s penchant for the weird and abstract allowed him to use his unique features and distinct, gravelly voice to create characters who were as devilishly memorable as the beasts they went up against.

From Salon ● Jul. 17, 2026

In childhood, he paints an abstract picture of God in which the Almighty eerily resembles a movie camera.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 16, 2026

These are not abstract changes on a map: they could affect harvests, water supplies and the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.

From BBC ● Jul. 14, 2026

But he’d been building this abstract new life for them since Luke took state their freshman year.

From "We'll Fly Away" by Bryan Bliss

This is a model that abstracts away from anatomical detail to focus on the core computations done by simple brains.

From Science Daily ● Jun. 5, 2026

His late 1980s abstracts have historically sold the best, with a collector in 2015 paying a record-setting $46.5 million for one of his 1986 untitled abstracts.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Apr. 9, 2026

As good as Teller is as a husband in crisis, the Oscar-winning Randolph is her own commanding source of light, enough to sell this movie’s feel-good abstracts and wry commentaries on her own.

From Los Angeles Times ● Nov. 25, 2025

IMGs had an average of 54 abstracts, presentations, and papers in 2022.

From Science Magazine ● May 3, 2024

Evidently it still appeared in the original Red Book, as it did in several of the copies and abstracts.

From "The Fellowship of the Ring" by J.R.R. Tolkien

Apps themselves might be abstracted away as smartphone agents call online services directly on behalf of their users.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 5, 2026

An azure booth is flanked by an abstracted mermaid sculpture, and elsewhere howling wolves are engraved into the bar tops.

From Los Angeles Times ● Feb. 26, 2026

One might have expected some gesture toward its origins, rather than its cool and highly abstracted references to Harlem.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Dec. 17, 2025

He added that the exemption that allows farmers to take up to 20,000 litres a day without a licence meant no-one could be sure how much water was being abstracted by farms across England.

From BBC ● Jul. 15, 2025

Gebu halted, turned with an oddly abstracted air and held out his hand for the coins.

From "The Golden Goblet" by Eloise Jarvis McGraw

“They’re not really abstracting away a stable comprehension of the world,” Marcus said of LLMs.

From MarketWatch ● Nov. 29, 2025

The bottle is the trap philosophers inadvertently create for themselves by abstracting concepts such as “knowledge,” “being” and “object” from their ordinary usage and analyzing them as though each has some kind of independent essence.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 18, 2025

We should pay less attention to the precedents and more to the impacts, and we need to stop abstracting the actual gains and losses that come out of these decisions.

From Slate ● Jun. 9, 2025

One of the UK's wealthiest women has had to pay £28,000 after abstracting too much water from a chalk stream during a drought.

From BBC ● Feb. 11, 2025

Leisured, and skilled at abstracting from immediate experience, the scholar is able to see how aspects of individual experience constitute a culture.

From "Hunger of Memory" by Richard Rodriguez

Related Words

• abstruse
• hypothetical
• philosophical
• unreal