abstracted
- 1Not paying attention to one's surroundings because of being absorbed in thought; mentally absent and preoccupied.
The professor wore an abstracted expression, oblivious to the students filing out of the hall.
She answered in an abstracted murmur, her thoughts clearly somewhere else entirely.
Similarpreoccupied, distracted, absent, faraway, distant
Oppositeattentive, alert, focused
Note
The sense modern readers hear first. It describes a person absorbed elsewhere, as in an abstracted scholar. Unlike the "set apart" meaning, it needs no from. It stands alone, before a noun or after a verb, as when Stephen Fry's narrator in The Liar (1991) says, "We Adrians are notoriously abstracted."
- 2Simple past and past participle of abstract.
She abstracted the key findings into a single concise page.
The metals were abstracted from the ore through repeated smelting.
Note
Spelling alone will not tell the verb from the adjective: in she abstracted the data it is a verb, and in an abstracted look it is an adjective. As a verb it carries all of abstract's meanings, including a euphemistic one: a clerk who abstracted funds took them without permission. The one regular -ed form serves both the simple past and the participle.
- 3Separated or disconnected from something else; withdrawn and standing apart.
The monastery sits abstracted from the valley below, reachable only by a winding mountain path.
Removed from daily commerce, the artists' colony remained abstracted from the city's noise and bustle.
Similarisolated, removed, separated, detached, withdrawn
Oppositeconnected, integrated, attached
Note
The literal picture behind every sense of the word: abstract plus -ed, the act of drawing something apart turned into a description of what has been set apart. It typically takes from, and it can follow its noun, as in Milton's Paradise Lost (1667): "the evil abstracted stood / From his own evil." Turned inward, the same image of standing apart becomes the absent-minded meaning.
Less common meanings
- 4Separated from matter; existing as a pure idea or ideal rather than in concrete, physical form.
The treatise described the soul as an abstracted essence, untouched by bodily matter.
I am not sure, that the best way of discussing any subject, except those, that concern the abstracted sciences, is not somewhat in the way of dialogue.
1796, Edmund Burke, “Letters on a Regicide Peace, Continued from Vol. VIII. Letter IV. To the Earl Fitzwilliam.”Note
A sense that has largely passed out of use. Where Edmund Burke wrote of "the abstracted sciences" in the 1790s, a modern writer would say abstract sciences. Avoid reviving it in plain prose, since today's readers will hear the absent-minded meaning instead, and abstracted sciences sounds like sciences lost in thought. In older philosophical writing, read it as "immaterial, purely ideal."
- 5Abstruse and difficult to understand; dealing with ideas too deep or obscure for easy grasp.
The philosopher's most abstracted arguments baffled even his devoted students.
Reviewers found the treatise abstracted and forbidding, its reasoning hard to penetrate.
Note
Here the separation is from easy understanding rather than from matter. Jonathan Swift, in 1704, called an argument "the most abstracted that ever I engaged in," one that strains the faculties "to their highest stretch." That mock-solemn superlative shows the word is gradable in this sense. It is archaic now. In current writing, abstruse or difficult carries the meaning without sounding distracted.
Showing meanings only.
abstracted is a form of abstract
abstract, verb: To summarize or condense a longer work into its main points. Full entry
- Forms
- abstractabstracts he/she/itabstracting -ing formabstracted past tense, past participle
- Spelling
- abstract → abstracted: add -ed
Practice
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Origin
Formed from the word "abstract" combined with the suffix "-ed".