Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The act or product of shortening.
  • noun A shortened form of a word or phrase used chiefly in writing to represent the complete form, such as Mass. for Massachusetts or USMC for United States Marine Corps.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun The act of abbreviating, shortening, or contracting; the state of being abbreviated; abridgment.
  • noun A shortened or contracted form; a part used for the whole.
  • noun In mathematics, a reduction of fractions to the lowest terms.
  • noun In music, a method of notation by means of which certain repeated notes, chords, or passages are indicated without being written out in full.
  • noun ;

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun The act of shortening, or reducing.
  • noun The result of abbreviating; an abridgment.
  • noun The form to which a word or phrase is reduced by contraction and omission; a letter or letters, standing for a word or phrase of which they are a part; as, Gen. for Genesis; U.S.A. for United States of America.
  • noun (Mus.) One dash, or more, through the stem of a note, dividing it respectively into quavers, semiquavers, or demi-semiquavers.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun music A notation used in music score to denote a direction, as pp or mf.
  • noun music One or more dashes through the stem of a note, dividing it respectively into quavers, semiquavers, demisemiquavers, or hemidemisemiquavers.
  • noun Any convenient short form used as a substitutuion for an understood or inferred whole.
  • noun biology Loss during evolution of the final stages of the ancestral ontogenetic pattern.
  • noun mathematics Reduction to lower terms, as a fraction.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a shortened form of a word or phrase
  • noun shortening something by omitting parts of it

Etymologies

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Examples

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  • abbReviATION

    June 14, 2008