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Shortening by apocope; the state of being apocopated.

A small loaf or cake of bread, raised and shortened, or made light with soda or baking powder. Usually a number are baked in the same pan, forming a sheet or card.

To make an abstract or abridgment of; to shorten; as, to brief pleadings.

colonel, and below a major general. He commands a brigade, and is sometimes called, by a shortening of his title, simple a brigadier.

To draw together or nearer; to reduce to a less compass; to shorten, narrow, or lesen; as, to contract one's shpere of action. In all things desuetude doth contract and narrow our faculties. Dr. H. More.

The power possessed by the fibers of living muscle of contracting or shortening.

The act or process of contracting, shortening, or shrinking; the state of being contracted; as, contraction of the heart, of the pupil of the eye, or of a tendion; the contraction produced by cold.

To cut off the end or tail, or any part, of; to shorten; to abridge; to diminish; to reduce. I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion. Shak. Our incomes have been curtailed; his salary has been doubled. Macualay.

Shortened or reduced; -- said of the distance of a planet from the sun or earth, as measured in the plane of the ecliptic, or the distance from the sun or earth to that point where a perpendicular, let fall from the planet upon the plane of the ecliptic, meets the ecliptic. Curtate cycloid. (Math.) See Cycloid.…

to pieces. (b) To slaughter; as, to cut an army to pieces. -- To cut a play (Drama), to shorten it by leaving out passages, to adapt it for the stage. -- To cut rates (Railroads, etc.), to reduce the charges for transportation below the rates established between competing lines. -- To cut short, to arrest or check…

That which cuts off or shortens, as a nearer passage or road.

A shortened form of Academia della Crusca, an academy in Florescence, Italy, founded in the 16th century, especially for conversing the purity of the Italian language.

To shorten by cutting; to cut off; to lop off.

disfigured. [Obs.] Dishonest with lopped arms the youth appears, Spoiled of his nose and shortened of his ears. Dryden.

Not yielding. Medicines used unnecessarily contribute to shorten life, by sooner rendering peculiar parts of the system disobedient to stimuli. E. Darwin.

To cut off a part from; to shorten; to deduct from; to subject to a deduction; as, to dock one's wages.

An exclamation denoting sufficiency, being a shortened form of it is enough.

To make an epitome of; to shorten or abridge, as a writing or discourse; to reduce within a smaller space; as, to epitomize the works of Justin.

n degree below knight and above gentleman; also, a title of office and courtesy; -- often shortened to squire.

than it really is; as, to fake a bulldog, by burning his upper lip and thus artificially shortening it.