# contention

Pronunciation: US say "kuhn-TEN-shuhn" /kənˈtɛnʃən/; UK

## Noun

1. Heated disagreement, dispute, or struggle between people or groups holding opposing positions.
   - Simple: Angry disagreement or fighting between people who do not agree.
   - _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._
2. A claim or position that someone puts forward and argues in support of during a dispute.
   - Simple: A point or claim that you argue is true and try to defend.
   - _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._
3. Competition among the parts of a system, or its users, for access to a limited shared resource.
   - Simple: When different parts of a computer or network try to use the same limited resource at the same time.
   - _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._

## 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.

Source: DictionaryAI, https://dictionaryai.com/define/contention (written from Wiktionary data, CC BY-SA 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).