contention
Pluralcontentions (some meanings)
- 1Heated disagreement, dispute, or struggle between people or groups holding opposing positions.
Years of contention between the rival families finally ended in a public reconciliation.
The proposed merger became a source of bitter contention among the shareholders.
Similardispute, disagreement, conflict, strife, discord
Oppositeagreement, harmony, accord, concord
Note
The noun built from contend, the way attention is built from attend: Middle English contencion, through Old French, from Latin contentio and the verb contendō. It names the struggling itself. It works both as a mass noun for strife in general and as a countable noun for particular disputes, so years of contention can be made up of many separate contentions.
- 2A claim or position that someone puts forward and argues in support of during a dispute.
The lawyer's central contention was that the evidence had been tampered with.
It is my contention that the policy will hurt small businesses the most.
Similarargument, claim, assertion, position, view
Note
Here the word moves from the quarrel to what is being argued: the thing one contends, not the act of contending. Its natural home is a that-clause, as in it is my contention that… or the contention that…. This framing presents a claim as one's own and open to challenge. Unlike the sense of strife, it implies no heat, and a contention can be put forward perfectly calmly.
- 3Competition among the parts of a system, or its users, for access to a limited shared resource.
Network engineers reduced contention by spreading data transfers more evenly across the day.
Lock contention in the database forced concurrent transactions to wait for one another.
Similarcompetition
Note
The quarrel moves into the machine. The rivals are processes, devices or users, and the prize is a resource that can serve only one of them at a time, such as a lock or a shared channel. Systems settle it by arbitration, queuing or back-off, and engineers talk of reducing contention rather than ending it. Lock contention and network contention are the everyday compounds.
Practice
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Origin
It comes from Middle English contencion, borrowed from Old French contencion, from Latin contentio (contentionem), from the verb contendo. It is equivalent to contend plus the suffix -tion.