noun

• 1The omission of a sound or syllable when speaking (as in I'm, let's)

  ‘the shortening of words by elision’

  More example sentences

  • ‘conversational elisions’
  • ‘Still others prefer a middle option that keeps the apostrophe for omission and elision but drops it for plurality and possession.’
  • ‘Aside from occasionally adopting hubby Elvis Costello's cute little habit of syllabic elision, The Girl is character-free.’
  • ‘Similar to the Raskind and Higgins study, the present research also found significant increases in phonological awareness (i.e., phonological elision and nonword reading).’
  • ‘The SRBP also improved the performance of the target group when compared with the contrast group on phonological elision and nonword reading efficiency tasks.’
  • ‘He puts sequences together classically, with no elisions.’

  Synonyms

  leaving out, exclusion, exception, non-inclusion, deletion, erasure, cut, excision, elimination, absence

  1. 1.1count noun An omission of a passage in a book, speech, or film.
     ‘the movie's elisions and distortions have been carefully thought out’
     More example sentences

     • ‘But the eighty-four-minute film's more crucial faults are really its elisions and omissions, among them its failure to flesh out its distinctive characters.’
     • ‘Such forms lead to distortions, exclusions, elisions and the establishment of hegemonies.’
     • ‘This is such an obvious elision that one's instinct is to read the passage again and look for a misprint, or a set of scare quotes - but, no, it is written as intended.’
     • ‘The role of the analyst is to hear the voice of the unconscious, which makes itself audible through the censorship of consciousness in riddles, allusions, elisions, and omissions.’
     • ‘I might as well declare my out-and-out fandom at the outset, born of the way each film accumulates authoritatively into its meaning through elisions and congruencies that are virtually baroque in their coiled vitality.’
     • ‘First, to dispense with the comparison of editions: apart from an altered layout and a few minor elisions and emendations, the book is the same as it ever was (as the lyric goes).’
     • ‘Reading his copious letters - this fat book is only a fifth of the 2,500-odd surviving, and there are elisions in most of those included - is very like hearing him talk.’
     • ‘We aimed to uncover the elisions that had silenced our experiences, for example, as working class women, and in Jo's case, as someone living with cancer.’
     • ‘The essay is excellent, and there is a temptation to admire this piece's intelligence and insights to the point at which one overlooks its elisions and oversights.’
     • ‘Every representation is defined by what it compresses or leaves out, and those elisions are made with a specific user in mind.’
     • ‘Unhappily, the argument rides on the back of some startling oversimplifications, exaggerations and elisions.’
     • ‘Again, with a little elision, this song speaks almost directly to voters.’
     • ‘No matter where you look in Performance, you find inconsistency, elisions, inaccuracies, and omissions.’
     • ‘Various non-docile members of the community, who Campbell attacks, spend a great amount of time analysing his words and actions for anomalies and wilful elisions.’
     • ‘This is hardly the place to rehearse the errors and elisions in his original article, or the way it allows its thesis like a steamroller to flatten the facts.’
     • ‘Pollock, the veteran actor Ed Harris's directorial debut, is a mass-audience movie, not a peer-reviewed treatise, and so it's not fair to pick at historical inaccuracies or elisions.’
     • ‘But Brontë's response implies that if we resist filling in the blanks and instead look closely at these elisions, we may find something more powerful in their place: a picture without words.’
     • ‘Visual experience thus takes the place of the kind of self-revelation expected in an autobiographical narrative, leaving the reader with mystifying elisions in Lucy's life story.’
     • ‘This is a rough cut, with some missing audio and some elisions, but it's fascinating to see how thoroughly choreographed this number was when so little of the choreography is visible in the finished film.’
     • ‘Constantly, the editing makes tiny elisions within the dialogue.’

• 2The process of joining together or merging things, especially abstract ideas.

  ‘unease at the elision of so many vital questions’

  More example sentences

  • ‘Across Europe, among the sceptics and the doubters and the out-and-out protesters, a pernicious process of elision is taking place.’
  • ‘However, this involves compaction and an elision; the self processes memory selectively.’
  • ‘The elision of two relatively stable and legitimate discourses of the idea of ‘capital’ and ‘emotional intelligence’ is a clever rhetorical move.’
  • ‘The obscurity of the pleading which is, if I may so with respect to the drafter of it, exceedingly clever, because the pleading is in terms always of a duty of care to do something and it is there the elision of two very separate ideas.’
  • ‘He has made substantial elisions and revisions to the facts for the sake of the story's flow.’
  • ‘As either a broadcast or digital networked democracy, the individual and his/her body are identified as the central fount of expressive freedom, an elision from the controlling power of institutionalized capitalism and the state.’
  • ‘As Liz Frost explores, there is an elision between the consumer power of youth in the Western world, and its ideation as physical perfection.’
  • ‘Like Mann, Wood develops the theme of the ‘imperialism of trade’, which is to say an elision of two apparently contradictory themes, direct domination, and free exchange.’
  • ‘There is an elision here in the use of the term ‘resource’.’
  • ‘The quotation contains a series of elisions: of time and place, of ancient and modern women, of women's bodies and the earth's body, of nostalgia and healing.’
  • ‘His work thus has the tendency to reproduce the elisions of the religious and political polemics of the sixteenth century while seeking to explain them.’
  • ‘Metaphorically, the elisions occur in the image of kissing.’