From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishabstractionab‧strac‧tion /əbˈstrækʃən, æb-/ AWL noun 1 [countable]IDEA a general idea about a type of situation, thing, or person rather than a specific example from real life He’s always talking in abstractions.2 [uncountable]NOTICE when you do not notice what is happening around you because you are thinking carefully about something else She rocked the baby gently, gazing in abstraction at the flickering fire.3 [uncountable] the use of shapes and patterns that do not look like real things
Examples from the Corpus
abstraction• Until now, our generation only knew war as an abstraction.• Such figures are too vast an abstraction.• Comprehension of algebra requires formal operations as its content is basically abstractions of abstractions.• Nowadays, of course, we understand that it was this way of talking about ethical abstractions that made them seem so mysterious.• And yet, we still describe symbols as intellectual abstractions.• Successive abstractions: these define the situation in terms of higher and lower levels of abstraction.• Among other things, they remind you that abstraction had its roots in spirituality.• Loyalty to the person of the monarch gave way to allegiance to the abstraction of the state.• It was then but an intellectual elision to view abstraction as the purest of all styles, since it depicted nothing at all. 