Abstract

1. That which comprises or concentrates in itself the essential qualities of a larger thing or of several things. Specifically: A summary or an epitome, as of a treatise or book, or of a statement; a brief.
2. To take secretly or dishonestly; to purloin; as, to abstract goods from a parcel, or money from a till.
3. To withdraw; to separate; to take away.
4. To separate, as ideas, by the operation of the mind; to consider by itself; to contemplate separately, as a quality or attribute.
5. Withdraw; separate.
6. A powdered solid extract of a vegetable substance mixed with sugar of milk in such proportion that one part of the abstract represents two parts of the original substance.
7. Expressing a particular property of an object viewed apart from the other properties which constitute it; -- opposed to concrete; as, honesty is an abstract word.
8. An abstract term.
9. To draw off in respect to interest or attention; as, his was wholly abstracted by other objects.
10. To perform the process of abstraction.
11. A state of separation from other things; as, to consider a subject in the abstract, or apart from other associated things.
12. 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.
13. To epitomize; to abridge.
14. Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general as opposed to particular; as, "reptile" is an abstract or general name.
15. Considered apart from any application to a particular object; separated from matter; existing in the mind only; as, abstract truth, abstract numbers. Hence: ideal; abstruse; difficult.
16. Abstracted; absent in mind.