Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- v. To shorten by or as if by cutting off. See Synonyms at shorten.
- v. To shorten (a number) by dropping one or more digits after the decimal point.
- v. To replace (the edge of a crystal) with a plane face.
- adj. Appearing to terminate abruptly, as a leaf of a tulip tree or a coiled gastropod shell that lacks a spire.
- adj. Truncated.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- To reduce in size or quantity by cutting; cut down; maim.
- In crystallography, to cut off an angle or edge by a plane section.
- Truncated. Specifically— In botany, appearing as if cut short at the tip by a transverse line, as the leaf of the tulip-tree, Liriodendron Tulipifera.
Wiktionary
- v. To shorten something as if by cutting off part of it.
- v. mathematics To shorten a decimal number by removing trailing (or leading) digits; to chop.
- v. geometry To replace a corner by a plane (or to make a similar change to a crystal).
- adj. truncated
- adj. botany, anatomy Having an abrupt termination.
GNU Webster's 1913
- v. To cut off; to lop; to maim.
- adj. Appearing as if cut off at the tip.
WordNet 3.0
- v. approximate by ignoring all terms beyond a chosen one
- v. make shorter as if by cutting off
- v. replace a corner by a plane
- adj. terminating abruptly by having or as if having an end or point cut off
Etymologies
- From Latin truncātus, perfect passive participle of truncō ("maim, reduce to a trunk"); see trunk as a verb. (Wiktionary)
- Latin truncāre, truncāt-, from truncus, trunk; see terə-2 in Indo-European roots. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“But in January 2011, HCL said, News International asked whether HCL was capable of helping "truncate" - meaning delete - "a particular database" in the e-mail system.”
“Alternatively you could always press the "truncate" button which will remove all chats from the database.”
“Young still strongly believes in the new ship, even as the Navy seeks to "truncate" the number it buys from seven ships to three and return to building Arleigh Burke DDG 51-class Aegis destroyers, which the Navy leadership claims are needed to combat new threats like ballistic missiles that the DDG 1000s weren't designed to defeat.”
“This breathtaking maneuver would provide Walter Ulbricht, the East German leader, with the authority to truncate Berlin and stop the stampede of refugees.”
“We have a real problem if members of the General Assembly are going and trying to influence and truncate an ethics committee process so that they can get the intended result that they want and then use that for impeachment," he said.”
Defiant Sanford threatens legal fight against 'kangaroo court'
“People like to truncate things in order to understand them but in reality there's no clear delineation.”
“It turns out that CAD software will calculate a convergance, but truncate the lines at the edge of the world as the software knows it.”
“Growing evidence that health claims truncate product search.”
“Elites try to truncate the presidential primary contests.”
“I think that the answer is that people mentally truncate the upper value of what you might win.”
St. Petersburg Paradox, Arnold Kling | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘truncate’.
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501
Classic
aberration, abstruse, anomaly, assiduous, august, banal, boisterous, dulcet, epitome, impudent, insolent, mellifluous and 401 more...
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501
Classic
abhor, mirth, obtuse, iota, vex, irk, teem, pith, moot, mete, ire, bane and 401 more...
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SAT Words
But only the ones that I don't already know.
abase, abash, abominate, abstruse, acclivity, accolade, accost, adroit, adulate, adulterate, adumbrate, affray and 241 more...
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INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
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501
Classic
aberration, abstruse, anomaly, assiduous, august, banal, boisterous, dulcet, epitome, impudent, insolent, mellifluous and 401 more...
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501
Classic
bane, bilk, boor, elan, ado, toil, onus, aberration, abstruse, anomaly, assiduous, august and 401 more...
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webdev
random webdev lingo used primarily in computer programming.
( open list, randomness, technical jargon, geek speak )
more:
ajax, user, admin, frontend, backend, database, sql, protocol, call, dom, layout, ui and 439 more... -
Undo
A list of terms that denote separating one thing from another, or deconstructing a thing into its parts or to a former state. E.g., untie, divorce, unscramble.
untie, divorce, unscramble, disunite, disjoin, undo, separate, disassemble, uncouple, unhitch, disassociate, disaffiliate and 185 more...
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to lessen
words to shorten, weaken, or lessen
attenuate, attrition, assuage, effete, truncate, curtail, nadir, severance, obviate, phthisis, eviscerate
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capitalcreative's Words
deviltry, visceral, cassanova, assuage, genesis, hot minute, osmosis, wistful, sublime, loathe, farfetched, newfangled and 283 more...
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pagecrusher's Words
fugu, ilk, rigamarole, superfluous, dearth, sacrosanct, moniker, bifurcate, villainous, onus, brazen, odin and 268 more...
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SAT Words
But only the ones that I don't already know.
abase, abash, abominate, abstruse, acclivity, accolade, accost, adroit, adulate, adulterate, adumbrate, affray and 241 more...
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My GRE Vocab
moniker, sobriquet, prerogative, aberration, aberrant, nuance, notorious, infamous, renown, allude, refer, content and 109 more...
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Advanced Words: Part II
facetious, felicitous, grandiloquent, germane, repatriate, exigency, exculpate, etheral, fatuous, heterogeneous, hiatus, idiosyncrasy and 118 more...
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ShuckFinn's Words
abecedarian, conflate, mondegreen, whit, truculent, downright, pugnacious, effluvium, canker, inveigle, obfuscate, melancholy and 227 more...
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The Sog Collection
My big word list.
chaos, flaccid, empirical, flotsam, cacophony, grumble, assuage, awe, romance, mortality, coalesce, fortuitous and 3282 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for truncate.
yarb Cold truncating surgeon's blade
razes what was St Tropezed.
- Peter Reading, C, 1984 Aug 2, 2008