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

Among wealthy university students in the 1880s and 1890s, there was a habit of shortening words and adding "-er" to the end, creating a kind of slang.

From BBC • Jun. 13, 2026

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

From MarketWatch • Jun. 5, 2026

“AI is in the midst of a capex boom with genuine risks: uncertain monetization, potential overbuild, shortening asset lives, and growing reliance on debt.”

From The Wall Street Journal • May 27, 2026

It expands the simulation in Syopsys’ chip design software to include electrical, thermal, electromagnetic, and mechanical effects, shortening the chip design pipeline for the increasingly complex architectures coming from AI chip makers.

From Barron's • May 27, 2026

He eased back ever so slightly on the reins and felt the horse’s stride come up under him, shortening.

From "Seabiscuit: An American Legend" by Laura Hillenbrand