Contraction

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Look up contraction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Contraction may refer to:

In physiology:

• Muscle contraction, one that occurs when a muscle fiber lengthens or shortens.
• Contraction (childbirth), a contraction during childbirth.
• Contraction, a stage in wound healing.

In linguistics:

• Synalepha, merging of two syllables of adjacent words into one by synaeresis or, more loosely, by elision.^[1]
  • Contraction (grammar), a shortened term formed by omitting the middle of a word or words.^[2]
    • Elision, the loss of a sound.
    • Syncope (phonetics), the loss of sounds inside a word.
  • Synaeresis, the coalescence of two vowels into a single long vowel or diphthong: "contraction" in Ancient Greek grammar.
    • Crasis, synaeresis of vowels belonging to adjacent words, making one word out of two.

In science:

• Lanthanoid contraction, the decrease in size of the ionic radius of lanthanoid elements with their growing atomic number (series of Rare Earth Elements (REE) in the Mendeleev Table).
• The reverse of thermal expansion.

In mathematics:

• Contraction mapping, in mathematics, a type of function on a metric space.
• Contraction (operator theory).
• Edge contraction or vertex contraction, graph operations used in graph theory.
• Tensor contraction in tensor theory.

Other:

• Braille contraction, used to decrease space and increase reading speed.
• Economic contraction or recession, a reversal of economic growth; the opposite of economic expansion.
• A structural rule in proof theory.
  Further information: idempotency of entailment

[edit] Notes

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