Contraction
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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.
- Contraction (grammar), a shortened term formed by omitting the middle of a word or words.[2]
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
- ^ Oxford English Dictionary, synalœpha, -phe, n.: OED online
- ^ New Hart's Rules Oxford (2005), p 166
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