Word family noun short shortage shortness shorts shorty adjective short verb shorten short adverb short shortly
From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishshortenshort‧en /ˈʃɔːtn $ ˈʃɔːrtn/ ●○○ verb [intransitive, transitive] SHORT/NOT LONGto become shorter or make something shorter OPP lengthen The days are shortening.shorten to His name is often shortened to Pat.→ See Verb tableExamples from the Corpus
shorten• It costs £12 to get trousers shortened.• Columns were raised, shortened, and narrowed.• Therefore the total unraveled length of a network can be shortened by adding nodes to it!• In the garden, warm colors move toward the eye, visually shortening distances.• The plane's wings can shorten for a jet-boosted takeoff.• Cream shortening, gradually adding sugar, egg and vanilla.• I heard she had an operation to shorten her nose.• The new procedure could shorten hospital stays by two to three days.• Cut the butter and shortening into small pieces, and add to the flour.• This essay's still too long, I'll have to shorten it by a couple of thousand words.• You can improve your writing just by shortening some of these long sentences.• The posture puts an unnatural stress on the spine and shortens the neck.• So the best cure might lie in shortening the period when that is possible.• The international automobile industry is a typical case where shortening the product development lead time is recognized as a valuable competitive weapon.• His name's Lawrence, but it's usually shortened to Larry. 