abstraction

a printed punctuation mark (‽), available only in some typefaces, designed to combine the question mark (?) and the exclamation point (!), indicating a mixture of query and interjection, as after a rhetorical question.

the offspring of a zebra and a donkey.

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Collins

World English Dictionary

abstraction (æbˈstrækʃən)

—n
1.	absence of mind; preoccupation
2.	the process of formulating generalized ideas or concepts by extracting common qualities from specific examples
3.	an idea or concept formulated in this way: good and evil are abstractions
4.	logic See also lambda calculus an operator that forms a class name or predicate from any given expression
5.	an abstract painting, sculpture, etc
6.	the act of withdrawing or removing

ab'stractive

—*adj*

ab'stractively

—*adv*

Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 10th Edition
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American Heritage

Medical Dictionary

abstraction ab·strac·tion (āb-strāk'shən, əb-)
n.

Distillation or separation of the volatile constituents of a substance.
Exclusive mental concentration; absent-mindedness.
A malocclusion in which the teeth or associated structures are lower than their normal occlusal plane.
The selection of a certain aspect of a concept from the whole.

FOLDOC

Computing Dictionary

abstraction definition

1. Generalisation; ignoring or hiding details to capture some kind of commonality between different instances. Examples are abstract data types (the representation details are hidden), abstract syntax (the details of the concrete syntax are ignored), abstract interpretation (details are ignored to analyse specific properties).
2. Parameterisation, making something a function of something else. Examples are lambda abstractions (making a term into a function of some variable), higher-order functions (parameters are functions), bracket abstraction (making a term into a function of a variable).
Opposite of concretisation.
(1998-06-04)

Example sentences

Abstraction is inductive thought and involves the construction of options.

The level of abstraction of these head-of-state types amazes me.

But he says no amount of academic abstraction will blind him to the qualities that make folklore so fascinating.

He perceived that the universe was not a faraway abstraction but rather something that included our planet and him.

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Images for abstraction

Matching Quote

"Hebraism contains no eternal realm of essence, which Greek philosophy was to fabricate, through Plato, as affording the intellectual deliverance from the evil of time. Such a realm of eternal essences is possible only for a detached intellect, one who, in Plato's phrase, becomes a "spectator of all time and all existence." This ideal of the philosopher as the highest human type—the theoretical intellect who from the vantage point of eternity can survey all time and existence—is altogether foreign to the Hebraic concept of the man of faith who is passionately committed to his own mortal being. Detachment was for the Hebrew an impermissible state of mind, a vice rather than a virtue; or rather it was something that Biblical man was not yet even able to conceive, since he had not reached the level of rational abstraction of the Greek. His existence was too earth-bound, too laden with oppressive images of mortality, to permit him to experience the philosopher's detachment."

-William Barrett