Abstract

1. a. Abstracted; absent in mind.
2. a. Withdraw; separate.
3. a. 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.
4. a. 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.
5. a. Resulting from the mental faculty of abstraction; general as opposed to particular; as, “reptile” is an abstract or general name.
6. a. To take secretly or dishonestly; to purloin; as, to abstract goods from a parcel, or money from a till.
7. a. 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.
8. v. t. To perform the process of abstraction.
9. a. 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.
10. a. A state of separation from other things; as, to consider a subject in the abstract, or apart from other associated things.
11. 1a. 1 Abstracted; absent in mind.

The word meanings were obtained from OPTED(The Online Plain Text English Dictionary), which is based on “The Project Gutenberg Etext of Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary” which is in turn based on the 1913 US Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (See Project Gutenburg), as a text file.