abstract

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

• adjective Considered apart from concrete existence.
• adjective Not applied or practical; theoretical.
• adjective Difficult to understand; abstruse.
• adjective Denoting something that is immaterial, conceptual, or nonspecific, as an idea or quality.
• adjective Impersonal, as in attitude or views.
• adjective Having an intellectual and affective artistic content that depends solely on intrinsic form rather than on narrative content or pictorial representation.
• noun A statement summarizing the important points of a text.
• noun Something abstract.
• noun An abstract of title.
• transitive verb To take away; remove.
• transitive verb To remove without permission; steal.
• transitive verb To consider (an idea, for example) as separate from particular examples or objects.
• transitive verb To write a summary of; summarize.
• transitive verb To create artistic abstractions of (something else, such as a concrete object or another style).
• idiom (in the abstract) In a way that is conceptual or theoretical, as opposed to actual or empirical.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To draw away; take away; withdraw or remove, whether to hold or to get rid of the object withdrawn: as, to abstract one's attention; to abstract a watch from a person's pocket, or money from a bank.
• To consider as a form apart from matter; attend to as a general object, to the neglect of special circumstances; derive as a general idea from the contemplation of particular instances; separate and hold in thought, as a part of a complex idea, while letting the rest go.
• To derive or obtain the idea of.
• To select or separate the substance of, as a book or writing; epitomize or reduce to a summary.
• To extract: as, to abstract spirit.
• To form abstractions; separate ideas; distinguish between the attribute and the subject in which it exists: as, “brutes abstract not,” Locke.
• [This is all founded on a false notion of the origin of the term. See above.]
• Conceived apart from matter and from special cases: as, an abstract number, a number as conceived in arithmetic, not a number of things of any kind.
• In grammar (since the thirteenth century), applied specially to that class of nouns which are formed from adjectives and denote character, as goodness, audacity, and more generally to all nouns that do not name concrete things.
• Having the mind drawn away from present objects, as in ecstasy and trance; abstracted: as, “abstract as in a trance,”
• Produced by the mental process of abstraction: as, an abstract idea.
• Demanding a high degree of mental abstraction; difficult; profound; abstruse: as, highly abstract conceptions; very abstract speculations.
• Applied to a science which deals with its object in the abstract: as, abstract logic; abstract mathematics: opposed to applied logic and mathematics.
• Separated from material elements; ethereal; ideal.
• noun That which concentrates in itself the essential qualities of anything more extensive or more general, or of several things; the essence; specifically, a summary or epitome containing the substance, a general view, or the principal heads of a writing, discourse, series of events, or the like.
• noun That portion of a bill of quantities, an estimate, or an account which contains the summary of the various detailed articles.
• noun In pharmacy, a dry powder prepared from a drug by digesting it with suitable solvents, and evaporating the solution so obtained to complete dryness at a low temperature (122° F.).
• noun A catalogue; an inventory.
• noun In grammar, an abstract term or noun.
• noun conceived apart from matter or special circumstances; without reference to particular applications; in its general principles or meanings.
• noun Synonyms Abridgment, Compendium, Epitome, Abstract, etc. See abridgment.

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

• transitive verb To withdraw; to separate; to take away.
• transitive verb To draw off in respect to interest or attention.
• transitive verb To separate, as ideas, by the operation of the mind; to consider by itself; to contemplate separately, as a quality or attribute.
• transitive verb To epitomize; to abridge.
• transitive verb To take secretly or dishonestly; to purloin.
• transitive verb (Chem.) To separate, as the more volatile or soluble parts of a substance, by distillation or other chemical processes. In this sense extract is now more generally used.
• adjective obsolete Withdraw; separate.
• adjective Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only. Hence: ideal; abstruse; difficult.
• adjective Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete.
• adjective Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general as opposed to particular.
• adjective Abstracted; absent in mind.
• adjective (Metaph.) an idea separated from a complex object, or from other ideas which naturally accompany it; as the solidity of marble when contemplated apart from its color or figure.