In medicine (obstetrics), a contraction is a forceful and painful motion of the uterus as part of the process of childbirth. Contractions, and labor in general, is one condition that releases the hormone oxytocin into the body.
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In traditional grammar, a contraction is the formation of a new word from two or more individual words. This often is a result of a common sequence of words, or, as in French, to maintain a flowing sound.
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Almost all literary Braille codes use contractions to decrease space and increase reading speed. The contractions presented here are used in the US literary Braille code.

Whole words contracted into a single letter

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An economic contraction is a reduction in goods and services for sale in the market place. Typically it relates to a downturn in production caused by external factors such as weather or a decline in exports, or by such internal factors as taxes, regulatory constraints or other
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In physics, thermal expansion is the tendency of matter to change in volume in response to a change in temperature. When a substance is heated, its constituent particles move around more vigorously and by doing so generally maintain a greater average separation.
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In mathematics, a contraction mapping, or contraction, on a metric space (M,d) is a function f from M to itself, with the property that there is some real number such that, for all x and y in M,

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In graph theory, an edge contraction is an operation which removes an edge from a graph while simultaneously merging together the two vertices it used to connect. All other edges incident to either of the two vertices become incident to the single merged vertex.
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A muscle contraction (also known as a muscle twitch or simply twitch) occurs when a muscle fiber generates tension through the action of actin and myosin cross-bridge cycling. While under tension, the muscle may lengthen, shorten or remain the same.
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In multilinear algebra, a tensor contraction is a sum of products of scalar components of one or more tensors caused by applying the summation convention to a pair of dummy indices which are bound to each other in an expression.
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synaeresis (Greek συναίρεσις) is the contraction of two vowels into a diphthong (or long vowel). If synaeresis is used against convention, it may serve as a rhetorical figure (a metaplasm).
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