shortening









shortening


noun

  1. butter, lard, or other fat, used to make pastry, bread, etc., short.
  2. Phonetics. the act, process, or an instance of making or becoming short.
  3. Linguistics.
    1. the act or process of dropping one or more syllables from a word or phrase to form a shorter word with the same meaning, as in forming piano from pianoforte or phone from telephone.
    2. clipped form.

verb (used with object)

  1. to make short or shorter.
  2. to reduce, decrease, take in, etc.: to shorten sail.
  3. to make (pastry, bread, etc.) short, as with butter or other fat.
  4. Sports. choke(def 8).

verb (used without object)

  1. to become short or shorter.
  2. (of odds) to decrease.

noun

  1. butter, lard, or other fat, used in a dough, cake mixture, etc, to make the mixture short

verb

  1. to make or become short or shorter
  2. (tr) nautical to reduce the area of (sail)
  3. (tr) to make (pastry, bread, etc) short, by adding butter or another fat
  4. gambling to cause (the odds) to lessen or (of odds) to become less
n.

1540s, “action of making short,” verbal noun from shorten. Meaning “butter or other fat used in baking” (1796) is from shorten in the sense “make crumbly” (1733), from short (adj.) in the secondary sense of “easily crumbled” (early 15c.), which perhaps arose via the notion of “having short fibers.” This is the short in shortbread and shortcake.

v.

1510s, “make shorter;” 1560s, “grow shorter,” from short (adj.) + -en (1); the earlier form of the verb was simply short, from Old English sceortian “to grow short, become short; run short, fail,” gescyrtan “to make short.”

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