The word for today is…
abstract (adjective, noun, verb):
adjective
1a: disassociated from any specific instance
b: difficult to understand : abstruse
c: insufficiently factual : formal
2: expressing a quality apart from an object
3a: dealing with a subject in its abstract aspects : theoretical
b: impersonal, detached
4: having only intrinsic form with little or no attempt at pictorial representation or narrative content
noun
1: a summary of points (as of a writing) usually presented in skeletal form, also : something that summarizes or concentrates the essentials of a larger thing or several things
2: an abstract thing or state
verb
1: to make a summary or abstract of : summarise
2: to draw away the attention of
3: steal, purloin
4: remove, separate
5: to consider apart from application to or association with a particular instance
Source : Merriam -Webster
Etymology : Abstract is most frequently used as an adjective (“abstract ideas”) and a noun (“an abstract of the article”), but its somewhat less common use as a verb in English helps to clarify its Latin roots. The verb abstract is used to mean “summarize,” as in “abstracting an academic paper.” This meaning is a figurative derivative of the verb’s meanings “to remove” or “to separate.”
We trace the origins of abstract to the combination of the Latin roots ab-, a prefix meaning “from” or “away,” with the verb trahere, meaning “to pull” or “to draw.” The result was the Latin verb abstrahere, which meant “to remove forcibly” or “to drag away.” Its past participle abstractus had the meanings “removed,” “secluded,” “incorporeal,” and, ultimately, “summarized,” meanings which came to English from Medieval Latin.
Interestingly, the word passed from Latin into French with competing spellings as both abstract (closer to the Latin) and abstrait (which reflected the French form of abstrahere, abstraire), the spelling retained in modern French.
The idea of “removing” or “pulling away” connects abstract to extract, which stems from Latin through the combination of trahere with the prefix ex-, meaning “out of” or “away from.” Extract forms a kind of mirror image of abstract: more common as a verb, but also used as a noun and adjective. The adjective, meaning “derived or descended,” is now obsolete, as is a sense of the noun that overlapped with abstract, “summary.” The words intersected and have separated in modern English, but it’s easy to see that abstract applies to something that has been summarized, and summarized means “extracted from a larger work.”
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