Definition of extract in English:

1Remove or take out, especially by effort or force.

1. 1.1Obtain (something such as money or an admission) from someone in the face of initial unwillingness.
   ‘I won't let you go without trying to extract a promise from you’
   More example sentences

   • ‘Despite promises of police reform, police continue to use torture to intimidate, harass and humiliate women detainees to extract money or information.’
   • ‘In my experience, the best way to extract information from an unwilling subject is to put a bullet into one of his thighs.’
   • ‘Once you hand over your details, the fraudster either starts extracting small sums of money from you till you have nothing left, or simply drains your bank account and again leaves you with nothing.’
   • ‘Information extracted by torture tends to be false.’
   • ‘During criminal investigation police frequently resort to torture to extract information from suspects while they are in their custody.’
   • ‘The Government is using stealth taxes to extract money from households behind their backs.’
   • ‘Moreover, the presiding officer can admit previous evidence extracted by torture.’
   • ‘It allows hard-pressed pensioners to extract money from their homes without having to sell them.’
   • ‘If your intention is to extract information, you cannot be accused of torture.’
   • ‘There are schemes around to extract money from your pension, but taking money out of your pension early is generally a bad move.’
   • ‘The judicial system quickly learned to live with the fact that defendants appeared in court bearing signs of torture or testified that confessions had been extracted from them by force.’
   • ‘These systems do not work because genuine cooperation cannot be extracted from people by force.’
   • ‘Braverman suggests that Taylor saw ‘the problem’ of management as being how to control and extract effort from a potentially recalcitrant work force.’
   • ‘So many times in the past we've seen chairmen play silly negotiating games in a childish effort to extract a few more bob from a buying club.’
   • ‘The bunch fills the road, riders snorting, heaving and blowing hard as they try to extract maximum effort from their tired bodies for one final frenzied lunge towards the line.’
   • ‘As in the case of the American South or Italian rural Fascism, the efforts being made to extract labour in the 1910s and 1920s tended to produce a particularly harsh system of control.’
   • ‘Various means were adopted for extracting the maximum effort from the people with the minimum satisfaction of their needs.’
   • ‘King always extracted a maximum effort and his underdogs performed better than they had a right to.’
   • ‘Taxes were paid, or extracted by force and the name of the king or the earl who ‘owned’ the land would make little difference to the ones working and living on it.’
   • ‘Employing a fluent Anatolian dialect and using minimum force Barossa extracts a vital nugget of information from the somewhat stubborn barber.’
   Synonyms

   wrest, exact, wring, screw, squeeze, milk, force, coerce, obtain by force, obtain by threat, obtain by threats, extort, blackmail someone for, worm something out of someone

   View synonyms
2. 1.2Obtain (a substance or resource) from something by a special method.
   ‘lead was extracted from the copper’
   More example sentences

   • ‘One of the methods used to extract caffeine from the coffee bean is called water processing.’
   • ‘Nevertheless, the most optimal method for extracting nucleic acid must also be determined for each specimen type.’
   • ‘Total sugars were extracted using the ethanol method as described above.’
   • ‘Clearly, the resources of Africa, the resources of Nigeria, are not going to benefit the people from the very region that resources are extracted from.’
   • ‘Nucleic acids were extracted from grains of wheat using a modification of the CTAB protocol as described by SALLARES et al. 1995.’
   • ‘Coconut or ‘copra’ oil is extracted from the coconut fruit.’
   • ‘The DNA including the red pigment gene is extracted from the apple.’
   • ‘Proteins extracted by the CTAB method were denatured in 1xSDS sample buffer prior to SDS-PAGE.’
   • ‘The sugar is extracted from the slices by means of diffusion with hot water.’
   • ‘The traditional method for extracting pure iron from its ore is to heat the ore in a blast furnace with limestone and coke.’
   • ‘The catch is that the oil is extracted from cotton laden with toxic pesticides and fertilizers, and grown with genetically modified organisms.’
   • ‘The risk seems to be higher in people treated between the ages of 8 and 10 years, and in those who received growth hormone extracted by the Wilhelmi method.’
   • ‘For western consumption, the butter is extracted from unfermented nuts by boiling in water, either in the country of origin or in the importing country.’
   • ‘Much of that coal was extracted using surface mining methods, either by area or contour stripping and angering.’
   • ‘Thyroid hormones were extracted from tadpoles following previously described methods.’
   • ‘Culture medium and cell-surface enzymes were extracted according to a method adapted from Wallner and Nevins.’
   • ‘Mercury is now extracted from its ores by a method that has been used for hundreds of years.’
   • ‘Soluble sugars were extracted using a modified method of Hasslemore and Roughan.’
   • ‘What is the oil and gas being extracted from Atlantic Canada being used for?’
   • ‘The five-megawatt reactor at Yongbyon generates spent fuel rods laced with plutonium, but they must be removed and reprocessed to extract the plutonium for use in a nuclear weapon.’
   Synonyms

   squeeze out, express, separate, press out, obtain, distil

   View synonyms
3. 1.3Select (a passage from a piece of writing, music, or film) for quotation, performance, or reproduction.
   ‘the table is extracted from the report’
   More example sentences

   • ‘Then with suitable software you can both search for text and select and extract text for insertion into your own document.’
   • ‘I extract that text directly out of our new library system, we have a group library system now in our company, with 150 newspapers on the database.’
   • ‘The inherent risk is loss/exposure of data if a hacker is able to extract the plain text.’
   • ‘Third, since the program does not support the indexing function for Korean, it is difficult to extract Korean text for full-text document retrieval.’
   • ‘Once you have managed to extract the text you want and to format it to your taste, there is no reason to limit yourself to a manual use of the script, or to use it only at the console for that matter.’
   • ‘Plugins can extract text that is trapped in files for full-text indexing.’
   • ‘To allow full-text retrieval ability, the system should be able to extract text from the transformed file.’
   • ‘From the cause of death register we extracted a list of all people aged less than 76 years who committed suicide in Denmark from 1981 to 1997.’
   • ‘They extracted the document recording the bet and officially ‘signed’ his admission of defeat with a thumbprint before returning the paper to the files for Thorne to discover later.’
   • ‘The relevant pages are extracted in those two volumes.’
   • ‘They reviewed all relevant publications and extracted an extended list of potential checklist items.’
   • ‘What we have done is undertaken our duty responsibly in seeking to extract the relevant documents from the relevant files so that only that which is relevant is before the court.’
   • ‘His piece was extracted in a high school text book.’
   • ‘In select passages we have extracted in paragraph 18, they have made some extremely cautionary remarks about how the failure to give evidence should be used.’
   • ‘a local English-language magazine published a good roundup of the case in August, from which this mini biography is extracted.’
   • ‘We extracted records on 32 384 patients who had not received such a drug in the preceding three months.’
   • ‘The similarity lies in what is reported, and in the fixed data across columns, and there is much programming effort in extracting it from the database.’
   • ‘Each article was reviewed, and the content dealing with each of the Task Force issues was extracted from the literature.’
   Synonyms

   excerpt, select, choose, reproduce, repeat, copy, quote, cite, cull, take, abstract

   View synonyms
4. 1.4Derive (an idea or the evidence for it) from a body of information.
   ‘the desire to extract meaningful lessons from a few experiments’
   More example sentences

   • ‘We have attempted to extract ideas about culture from particular instances of cultural production (including discussion).’
   • ‘Nicola Corboy extracts ideas from each of the six modules.’
   • ‘Millions of people look to her for ideas about how to live, to the point where that caller was hoping she could extract some ideas for living out of the prison experience.’
   • ‘Remember - he's extracting this idea out of a piece lamenting the possible destruction of New York.’
   • ‘A more profound student of the Civil War than Wolseley, Henderson took the lead in extracting important ideas from the American experience.’
   • ‘Plato's way of writing leaves us to extract ideas from different dialogues, put them together, and work out his position on a given issue.’
   • ‘Then, elated with the tranquillity of aloneness, I sat upon dusty shoes extracting ideas from my brain to be written painfully into my journal.’
   • ‘To do this they extracted the mathematical ideas in each problem and communicated their reasoning about those ideas by mutually supporting their verbal and nonverbal behaviors.’
   • ‘In extracting the basic concepts of observation, description and communication from my visual education, I have literally defined myself as a coach.’
   • ‘Only the most dedicated wine-maker can extract any suggestion of Elbling's evanescent flavour of just-ripe apricots but this is a wine to appeal to viticultural archivists.’
   • ‘Those whose livelihood hinges on their ability to extract interesting thoughts from fundamentally uninteresting people have grown moustaches to signify their collective dolefuleness.’
   • ‘It shows the hard times spent over attempts to extract a meaning out of signs.’
   • ‘When one attempts to extract something meaningful from this passage, one faces an uphill struggle, yet this is by no means an isolated example of such wilful obfuscation and hyperbole.’
   • ‘Sophisticated analysis techniques allow researchers to extract meaningful results from spectral imaging data.’
   • ‘NASA engineers and astronauts extracted a valuable lesson from this mission: It was difficult, if not impossible, to steer a spacecraft merely by eye.’
   • ‘A defeat would not necessarily prove fatal and you can be sure that positives would be extracted from a draw, but a win for either side would be a giant step towards qualification with just two games remaining.’
   • ‘Despite her efforts to extract hope from tragedy, the war years continue to cast a long shadow over her life.’
   • ‘I am deeply afraid I will surprise him one day beating his head on the table in an effort to extract the solution he's seeking.’
   • ‘In an effort to extract additional insight from these data, we have used survival analysis to estimate a model of bear response to human activity.’
   • ‘And I hope that the effort required to extract a positive philosophical position from her letters has borne out this claim.’
   Synonyms

   derive, develop, evolve, deduce, infer, conclude, gather, elicit, obtain, get, take, gain, acquire, procure, attain, glean

   View synonyms
5. 1.5Mathematics Calculate (a root of a number).
   More example sentences

   • ‘I was allowed to use the new Friden calculating machine which, shortly before its transformation into a relic, could also extract square roots.’
   • ‘You will often find a button on your calculator which extracts roots (perhaps marked y x) near the button which computes the power of a number (marked x y).’
   • ‘They question the computers, add and subtract, extract square roots, and then go into action.’
   • ‘An ROM may be used in lieu of the squares and the device for extracting square root.’

1A short passage taken from a piece of writing, music, or film.

2A preparation containing the active ingredient of a substance in concentrated form.