How to Use abstraction in a Sentence

abstraction

noun
  • She gazed out the window in abstraction.
  • The show suggests that Ailey worked in ways similar to Valentim—both were reaching back in time, retrieving elements of Africa’s past via abstraction.
    Alex Greenberger, ARTnews.com, 19 Dec. 2024
  • And they were made in the 1960s, a time when abstraction reigned.
    BostonGlobe.com, 21 May 2021
  • The idea of colds as a little trial for the soul is an abstraction.
    Addison Del Mastro, The Week, 16 Feb. 2022
  • These make sense in the world they're set in, with little abstraction.
    Chuong Nguyen and Samuel Axon, Ars Technica, 24 Mar. 2023
  • For most of us, the intense drought that is gripping most of the state is an abstraction.
    Robert Gehrke, The Salt Lake Tribune, 28 May 2021
  • For most of us, this was how the crisis was viewed - from the abstraction of space, a mutation of the map.
    Henry Wismayer, Anchorage Daily News, 30 Aug. 2022
  • For most of us, this was how the crisis was viewed — from the abstraction of space, a mutation of the map.
    Henry Wismayer, Washington Post, 29 Aug. 2022
  • As a measure of time, a year can seem like an abstraction.
    Time, 23 Dec. 2020
  • American art was swept up in the post-war rage for abstraction.
    Washington Post, 30 Mar. 2022
  • The effects of climate change are no longer an abstraction.
    Washington Post, 26 Oct. 2021
  • The Maryland native varies the view with close-ups of water and plants, some of which approach abstraction.
    Washington Post, 23 Apr. 2021
  • The abstraction of genre is stripped away to favor the fight-or-flight behavior that slasher movies try to capture in the first place.
    Wired, 10 July 2022
  • In those moments, his words seemed like an abstraction.
    Chris Megerian, Vanessa Gera and Aamer Madhani, Anchorage Daily News, 27 Mar. 2022
  • The experts are too deep in the weeds, while policy makers seem lost in abstractions.
    Yuval Levin, WSJ, 21 Dec. 2023
  • The paintings run the gamut of abstraction, from moody to exuberant.
    Kriston Capps, Washington Post, 30 Aug. 2023
  • Af Klint, for those keeping score, seems to have beaten Kandinsky to the punch of modern abstraction by five years.
    Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 8 Nov. 2021
  • Some researchers see a trend toward greater abstraction in the field in the design of new network metrics.
    Grace Huckins, Wired, 17 Aug. 2020
  • The first of which involved not falling too far into abstraction based on the fact the cast includes more than 100 actors.
    John Benson, cleveland, 22 Oct. 2020
  • But Lawrence yields only so much to the prevailing taste for abstraction.
    Washington Post, 18 Nov. 2020
  • The two may seem like opposites — 1920s Spanish baroque and punchy Day-Glo abstraction — but each is happy to put on a show.
    John King, SFChronicle.com, 6 Jan. 2020
  • Drawn to abstraction, Villa had a fair amount of success early on.
    Los Angeles Times, 31 Aug. 2022
  • The move over the previous decade from abstraction to figuration among the avant-garde.
    Eric Gibson, WSJ, 15 Nov. 2023
  • The installation’s skein of lines might thus be read as mere abstraction, like a Jackson Pollock on the grass.
    Blake Gopnik, New York Times, 18 Aug. 2023
  • But the broken freezer on top of the world has remained an abstraction for most of the planet’s 7.7 billion people.
    Anchorage Daily News, 14 Dec. 2019
  • Zero’s latest surprise may be in just how well the brain learns to handle that abstraction.
    Michaela Maya-Mrschtik, Scientific American, 21 Oct. 2024
  • Kevin Durant, to them, is just an abstraction, a guy on the TV, a figment of their imaginations.
    New York Times, 2 June 2021
  • Vengeance here is, thrillingly, more than an abstraction.
    Lovia Gyarkye, The Hollywood Reporter, 14 Aug. 2024
  • Any sense of self washed away and time became a meaningless abstraction.
    Daniel Oberhaus, Wired, 14 Oct. 2020
  • Math should be thought of as a dialog between the two: between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction.
    Kelsey Houston-Edwards, WIRED, 8 Dec. 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'abstraction.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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