Senses relating to becoming involved with or entering into, especially entering into a contract. • An act of incurring debt; also (generally), an act of acquiring something (generally negative). • An act of entering into a contract or agreement; specifically, a contract of marriage; a contracting; also (obsolete), a betrothal. • The process of contracting or becoming infected with a disease. • Senses relating to pulling together or shortening. • A (sometimes reversible) contracting or reduction in length, scope, size, or volume; a narrowing, a shortening, a shrinking. • An abridgement or shortening of writing, etc.; an abstract, a summary; also (uncountable), brevity, conciseness. • A stage of wound healing during which the wound edges are gradually pulled together. • A shortening of a muscle during its use; specifically, a strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth. • A period of economic decline or negative growth. • A process whereby one or more sounds of a free morpheme (a word) are reduced or lost, such that it becomes a bound morpheme (a clitic) that attaches phonologically to an adjacent word. • In the English language: a shortened form of a word, often with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe or a diacritical mark. • Synonym of syncope (“the elision or loss of a sound from the interior of a word, especially of a vowel sound with loss of a syllable”). • The preimage of the given ideal under the given homomorphism. • A shorthand symbol indicating an omission for the purpose of brevity. • An act of collecting or gathering.