A contraction is a shortened version of the spoken and written forms of a word, syllable, or word group, created by omission of internal letters and sounds.
In linguistic analysis, contractions should not be confused with crasis, abbreviations and initialisms (including acronyms), with which they share some semantic and phonetic functions, though all three are connoted by the term "abbreviation" in layman’s terms. Contraction is also distinguished from morphological clipping, where beginnings and endings are omitted.
The definition overlaps with the term portmanteau (a linguistic blend), but a distinction can be made between a portmanteau and a contraction by noting that contractions are from words that would otherwise appear together in sequence, such as do and not, whereas a portmanteau word is formed by combining two or more existing words that all relate to a singular concept that the portmanteau describes.
English English has a number of contractions, mostly involving the elision of a vowel, which is usually replaced by an apostrophe in writing, as in I'm for "I am", and sometimes other changes as well. Contractions are common in speech and in informal writing but tend to be avoided in more formal writing (with limited exceptions, such as the now-standard form "o'clock"). Pronouns with contractions such as "they're", "we've", "it's" ect. have become more accepted as standard English and are now commonplace even within formal settings. Complete evasion of contractions can make writing sound unnatural such as "they will see that it is just what we are like" being more naturally restated as "they'll see that it's just what we're like".
The main contractions are listed in the following table. Full form Contracted Notes I am I'm standard, as in "I'm here". are -'re standard; as in "they're coming". does -'s informal, as in "what's he do there every day?" is standard, as in "he's driving right now" or "it's enough". has standard, as in "she's been here before". have -'ve standard, as in "I've never done this before". had -'d standard, as in "he'd already left" or "we'd better go". did informal, as in "where'd she go?" would standard, as in "we'd get in trouble if we break the door". will -'ll standard, as in "they'll call you later". shall standard, as in "we'll call you later". let us let's informal, as in "let's do this". going to gonna very informal, as in "I'm gonna do it". want to wanna very informal, as in "I wanna do it". got to gotta very informal, as in "I've gotta do it". ought to oughta very informal, as in "I oughta do it". am not / are not / is not / has not / have not ain't informal, as in "I ain't seen her"; "ain't" covers a broad array of contractions and is often used without strict rules, reliant on mutual understanding of meaning and use. While a long-standing feature of English, possibly first used in place of an absent "am not" contraction, it is considered to be an incorrect use of English by descriptivist grammarians. of o'- standard in some fixed compounds,Fixed compound is a word phrase used grammatically as a noun or other part of speech (but, in this case, not a verb) where the phrase is invariant and widely understood. The phrase does not change no matter where it occurs in a sentence or elsewhere, nor can individual elements be substituted with synonyms (but alternatives to the compound may exist). They may be considered idiomatic though the meaning of most were transparent when coined. Many are usually written hyphenated, but that reflects a common preference to hyphenate English compounds (except verbs) containing prepositions. "Fixed" is a matter of degree, and in this case, it essentially means "standard": that the contraction is not considered informal is the best sign that it is fixed. as in three o'clock, cat o' nine tails, jack-o'-lantern, will-o'-the-wisp, and (in some contexts) man o' war; informal otherwise, as in "cup o' coffee", "barrel o' monkeys", or "Land o' Goshen" of the it was 'twas archaic, except in stock uses such as 'twas the night before Christmas it is 'tis archaic, except in stock uses such as 'tis the season them 'em informal, partially from hem, the original dative and accusative of they you y'- dialectal; 2nd person pronoun (you) has plurality marked in some varieties of English (e.g. Southern United States) by combining with e.g. all, which is then usually contracted to y'all in which case it likely is standardIn varieties that do not normally mark plurality (so use unmodified you as the pronoun when addressing a single person or group), there may be times in which speakers want to make it clear that they are addressing multiple people by employing you all (or both of you, etc.) in which case the contraction y'all would never be used. (The contraction is a strong sign of an English variety that normally marks plurality.) about very informal, as in "I'll come by 'bout noon". because very informal, as in "why did you do it? - Just 'cause." and 'n' informal, as in "fish 'n' chips". upon 'pon archaic or poetic in most dialects, as in "once 'pon a time"; common in Caribbean English.
+Position of not/n't in a negative closed interrogative After, or as an inflectional suffix of, the auxiliary verb After the subject not *Will not you attend?This article uses an asterisk to indicate ungrammatical examples. Will you not attend? -n't Won't you attend? *Will you n't attend? Although can't, wouldn't and other forms ending n't clearly started as contractions, n't is now neither a contraction (a cliticized form) nor part of one but instead a negative inflectional suffix. Evidence for this is (i) n't occurs only with auxiliary verbs, and clitics are not limited to particular categories or subcategories; (ii) again unlike contractions, their forms are not rule-governed but idiosyncratic (e.g., will → won't, can → can't); and (iii) as shown in the table, the inflected and "uncontracted" versions may require different positions in a sentence.
Albanian In Albanian there are two main contractions, and , both used for verbs, which are short for (what) and (not) respectively.
Chinese The Old Chinese writing system (oracle bone script and bronzeware script) is well suited for the (almost) one-to-one correspondence between morpheme and glyph. Contractions in which one glyph represents two or more morphemes are a notable exception to that rule. About 20 or so are noted to exist by traditional philologists and are known as (, lit. 'concurrent words'), and more words have been proposed to be contractions by recent scholars, based on recent reconstructions of Old Chinese phonology, epigraphic evidence, and syntactic considerations. For example, [] has been proposed to be a contraction of () + / (/). The contractions are not generally graphically evident, and there is no general rule for how a character representing a contraction might be formed. As a result, the identification of a character as a contraction, as well as the word(s) that are proposed to have been contracted, is sometimes disputed.
As vernacular Chinese dialects use sets of function words that differ considerably from Classical Chinese, almost all of the classical contractions that are listed below are now archaic and have disappeared from everyday use. However, modern contractions have evolved from the new vernacular function words. Modern contractions appear in all major modern dialect groups. For example, () 'don't' in Standard Mandarin is a contraction of (), and () 'don't' in Shanghainese is a contraction of (), as is apparent graphically. Similarly, in Northeastern Mandarin () 'needn't' is a phonological and graphical contraction of (). Finally, Cantonese contracts () 'what?' to ().
Table of Classical Chinese contractions TransliterationOld Chinese reconstruction search containing William H. Baxter's reconstructions. Contraction Transliteration Notes In some rarer cases can also be contraction for . can be used on its own with the meaning of "all, the class of", as in "the feudal lords". []note is never used; only . Rare. []note Rare. The prepositions , , and are of different origin, but used interchangeably (except that can also be used as a final question particle). []note []note and were originally not contractions, but were reanalyzed as contractions in the Warring States period. is a variant of . Also written . Also written . Probably a dialectal variant of . has many other meanings.
Dutch Here are some of the contractions in Standard Dutch: Full form Contracted Translation Note of Genitive form of the Dutch article "the" a, an her Originally from the Dutch determiner "her, their" him it the I my his such a
Informal Belgian Dutch uses a wide range of non-standard contractions such as "" (from "" - how are you?), "" (from "" - he's there), "" (from "" - we had eaten well) and "" (from "" - what is that?. Some of these contractions:
Full form Contracted Translation Note that that is that I you is what we she
French
French has a variety of contractions like in English except that they are mandatory, as in ("that's life") in which stands for + ("that is"). The formation of such contractions is called elision.
In general, any monosyllabic word ending in (schwa) contracts if the following word begins with a vowel, or (as is silent and absorbed by the sound of the succeeding vowel; sounds like ). In addition to → (demonstrative pronoun "that"), these words are → (conjunction, relative pronoun, or interrogative pronoun "that"), → ("not"), → ("himself", "herself", "itself", "oneself" before a verb), → ("I"), → ("me" before a verb), → (informal singular "you" before a verb), or → ("the"; or "he", "she", "it" before a verb or after an imperative verb and before the word or ), and → ("of"). Unlike with English contractions, however, those contractions are mandatory: one would never say (or write) or .
("me") and (informal "you") mandatorily contract to and , respectively, after an imperative verb and before the word or .
It is also mandatory to avoid the repetition of a sound when the conjunction ("if") is followed by ("he", "it") or ("they"), which begin with the same vowel sound : → ("if it", if he"); → ("if they").
Certain prepositions are also mandatorily merged with masculine and plural direct articles: for , for , for , and for . However, the contraction of (demonstrative pronoun "that") to is optional and informal.
In informal speech, a personal pronoun may sometimes be contracted onto a following verb. For example, (, "I don't know") may be pronounced roughly (), with the being completely elided and the of being mixed with the of . It is also common in informal contexts to contract to before a vowel: for .
German
In informal, spoken German prepositional phrases, one can often merge the preposition and the article; for example, becomes , becomes , or becomes . Some of these are so common that they are mandatory. In informal speech, for , for , etc. are also used, but would be considered to be incorrect if written, except maybe in quoted direct speech, in appropriate context and style.
The pronoun often contracts to (usually written with the apostrophe) in certain contexts. For example, the greeting is usually encountered in the contracted form .
Local languages in German-speaking areas