Contraction

Look up contraction in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Contraction may refer to:

Linguistics

• Contraction (grammar), a shortened version of the written and spoken forms of a word, syllable, or word group
• Poetic contraction, the omission of letters in a word for poetic reasons
• Elision, the omission of one or more sounds in a word or phrase
  • Syncope (phonetics), the loss of sounds inside a word
• Synalepha, merging of two syllables into one
  • Synaeresis, combination of two adjacent vowels within a word into a single syllable
  • Crasis, merger of two vowels or diphthongs into one new vowel or diphthong

Mathematics

• Contraction (operator theory), in operator theory, state of a bounded operator between normed vector spaces after suitable scaling
• Contraction hierarchies, in applied mathematics, a technique to speed up shortest-path routing
• Contraction mapping, a type of function on a metric space
• Edge contraction or vertex contraction, graph operations used in graph theory
• Tensor contraction, an operation on one or more tensors that arises from the natural pairing of a finite-dimensional vector space and its dual
• One of the rules of conditional independence in probability
• A structural rule in proof theory

Medicine

• Muscle contraction,a change that occurs when a muscle fiber lengthens or shortens
  • Uterine contraction, contraction of the uterus, such as during childbirth
• Contractility, the intrinsic ability of the heart/myocardium to contract
• Wound contraction, a stage in wound healing

Other uses

• Contraction (economics), a general slowdown in economic activity; the opposite of economic expansion
• Contraction (physics), change in the volume of matter in response to a change in temperature
• Lanthanide contraction, the decrease in size of the ionic radius of lanthanide elements with their growing atomic number
• Contracted (film), a 2013 horror thriller film by Eric England

See also

• Contraction principle (disambiguation)

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