All 9 Uses

contract
in
East of Eden
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I contracted pleural pneumonia, in that day a killing disease.
Chpt 14 *

contracted = got (became ill with)
His stomach contracted.
Chpt 54 *

contracted = cramped (tightened as the muscles shortened)
While he was carving his beechwood leg and hobbling about on a crutch, he contracted a particularly virulent dose of the clap from a Negro girl who whistled at him from under a pile of lumber and charged him ten cents.†
Chpt 3
You had less chance of contracting a difficulty at Faye's than with your Sunday School teacher.†
Chpt 19
They were brought in by contract, and perhaps the history of my father was a fairly typical one.†
Chpt 28
One thing the recruiting agents for the railroad companies did—they paid down a lump of money on the signing of the contract.†
Chpt 28
It did not occur to them to run away once they were in America, for they were honorable people and they had signed the contract.†
Chpt 28 *
We could contract five thousand acres of beans.†
Chpt 41
And farmers wished they hadn't contracted their beans for a lousy two cents a pound above the going price six months ago.†
Chpt 42

Definitions:

(1) (contract as in: legal contract)
an agreement - typically written and enforceable by law
(2) (contract as in: contract the disease)
to get -- especially in reference to a disease
(3) (contract as in: the metal contracted in the cold)
when something gets shorter or smaller
(4) (meaning too rare to warrant focus)
A grammatical sense of the word form contraction describes can't as a shortened form of can not.