Contraction

[Fr.; from Lat. contractio.] Act of contracting or drawing together; act of shortening or narrowing in quantity or extent; abbreviation; curtailment. "The main parts of the poem.. no translator can prejudice, but by omi ions or contractions." - Pope. State of being contracted, narrowed, le ened, or shrivelled; as, contraction of the stomach. (Opposed to dila tation .) (Gram.) The shortening of a word by the omi ion of a letter or syllable. The Greek language abounds with contractions, which have been adopted chiefly to avoid a harshne in the pronunciation arising from the concurrence of two vowels in two succe ive syllables or words. Hence two or more simple vowels coming together are usually contracted into a diphthong. This is said to be proper when they are contracted without change into a diphthong; improper , when, in the contraction a vowel or diphthong of a different sound is substituted. Elision takes place when two vowels at the end of one and at the beginning of another word come together, and the final vowel of the first word is rejected, its place being marked by an apostrophe placed over the consonant which is left. This takes place chiefly with the poets. Crasis is that kind of contraction in which two words coalesce into one, and are accented as one, without any elision. In synthesis two vowels are contracted into one sound-not in writing, but in pronunciation. In the Middle Ages, before the introduction of printing, numerous contractions were resorted to for the purpose of abbreviating the labor of transcription.