shortening
- butter, lard, or other fat, used to make pastry, bread, etc., short.
- Phonetics. the act, process, or an instance of making or becoming short.
- Linguistics.
- 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.
- clipped form.
Origin of shortening
shorten
- to make short or shorter.
- to reduce, decrease, take in, etc.: to shorten sail.
- to make (pastry, bread, etc.) short, as with butter or other fat.
- Sports. choke(def 8).
Origin of shorten
Synonyms for shorten
See more synonyms for on Thesaurus.comExamples from the Web for shortening
Contemporary Examples of shortening
Remove the butter and shortening from the freezer, and toss them with the dry ingredients, coating them well.
The RNC report recommends cutting the number of debates in half and shortening the debating season.
From freeing prisoners to shortening school weeks, Benjamin Sarlin presents 10 of the toughest cuts.
A law is being considered that would allow the shortening of the 30-day notice period required to get married.
Historical Examples of shortening
The odds are shortening because, by Jove, people have taken the horse.
And up she went and down she went, shortening and lengthening, swelling and decreasing.
Dr. SevierGeorge W. Cable
Or was it indicative of a shortening of our religious privileges?
The Prison Chaplaincy, And Its ExperiencesHosea Quinby
Hence the demand has arisen for a shortening of the college course.
College TeachingPaul Klapper
With the vague notion of shortening sail, I let the sheet go from my hand.
RomanceJoseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer
shortening
- butter, lard, or other fat, used in a dough, cake mixture, etc, to make the mixture short
shorten
- to make or become short or shorter
- (tr) nautical to reduce the area of (sail)
- (tr) to make (pastry, bread, etc) short, by adding butter or another fat
- gambling to cause (the odds) to lessen or (of odds) to become less
Word Origin and History for shortening
1540s, "action of making short," verbal noun from shorten. Meaning "butter or other fat used in baking" (1796) is from shorten in the sense "make crumbly" (1733), from short (adj.) in the secondary sense of "easily crumbled" (early 15c.), which perhaps arose via the notion of "having short fibers." This is the short in shortbread and shortcake.