abstraction
noun
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From its roots, abstraction should mean basically "something pulled or drawn away". So abstract art is art that has moved away from painting objects of the ordinary physical world in order to show something beyond it. Theories are often abstractions; so a theory about economics, for instance, may "pull back" to take a broad view that somehow explains all of economics (but maybe doesn't end up explaining any of it very successfully). An abstract of a medical or scientific article is a one-paragraph summary of its contents—that is, the basic findings "pulled out" of the article.
Examples of abstraction in a Sentence
News Desk, Artforum, 12 June 2026
For Emory, the abstraction is also daily and personal.
—Jeff Ihaza, VIBE.com, 11 June 2026
When embarking on this transformation, the first priority was to create a semantic abstraction layer of all of the company’s data to gain an understanding of what data represents customers, what represents network elements, and all the other data objects.
—Sage Lazzaro, Fortune, 9 June 2026
That the killer is more or less an abstraction, rather than a simple mouse to Takabe’s cat, transforms this whodunit into something much more existentially terrifying.
—Declan Gallagher, Entertainment Weekly, 9 June 2026
See All Example Sentences for abstraction
Cite this Entry
“Abstraction.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/abstraction. Accessed 16 Jun. 2026.
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abstraction
noun
