Showing results for "shortening"

• present participle of shorten.

shortening

American  

[shawrt-ning, shawr-tn-ing] / ˈʃɔrt nɪŋ, ˈʃɔr tn ɪŋ /

noun

shortenings plural

1. butter, lard, or other fat, used to make pastry, bread, etc., short.

2. Phonetics. the act, process, or an instance of making or becoming short.

3. Linguistics.

   1. the act or process of dropping one or more syllables from a word or phrase to form a shorter word with the same meaning, as in forming piano from pianoforte or phone from telephone.

   2. clipped form.

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shortening British  

/ ˈʃɔːtənɪŋ /

noun

1. butter, lard, or other fat, used in a dough, cake mixture, etc, to make the mixture short

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Other Word Forms

Noun Inflected Forms

• shortenings
  plural

Etymology

Origin of shortening

First recorded in 1535–45; shorten + -ing ¹

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

shortening shortenings

By binding to that location, the tool prevented cancer cells from reaching and shortening the end, or tail, of the molecule.

From Science Daily ● Jul. 26, 2026

Tour de France organisers announced that they were shortening the following day's final stage of the cycling race due to the wildfires ravaging southwest France.

From Barron's ● Jul. 26, 2026

Friday’s stock-market action might have made for a shortening of memories.

From MarketWatch ● Jun. 5, 2026

The heat was shortening the life of his produce as surely as it was shortening the market day.

From BBC ● Jun. 1, 2026

Ba had found his tongue and was explaining that the fair weather had sped up his ship, shortening the time at sea.

From "The Red Car to Hollywood" by Jennie Liu

“Fats and shortenings are absolutely critical to pies,” says Ernest Miller, research and development chef at Coast Packing Co., a major supplier of animal fats and shortenings for cooking, baking and frying based in Vernon.

From Los Angeles Times ● Oct. 5, 2017

Anna Wierzbicka, a linguistics professor at the Australian National University, has said the country’s love affair with such shortenings reflects cherished ideals like “mateship,” humor, informality and a dislike for “long words.”

From New York Times ● Sep. 25, 2017

“You must like to decipher lousy handwriting, shortenings and a text without punctuation. You have to know the vocabulary of the 19th century,” Kutzer said.

From Washington Times ● Apr. 2, 2017

At fault are the so-called trans monounsaturated fatty acids used as hardeners in margarines, shortenings and commercial frying fats.

From Time Magazine Archive

The prevailing character of the school of Parma, by way of distinction likewise called the Lombard school, is the excellence of its shortenings, like the delineation of the nerves and muscles in that of Florence.

From The History of Painting in Italy, Vol. IV (of 6) from the Period of the Revival of the Fine Arts to the End of the Eighteenth Century by Lanzi, Luigi Antonio