All 3 Uses of
retract
in
The Mark of Athena
- On a normal trireme, most of the space would've been taken up with three rows of benches for a few hundred sweaty guys to do the manual labor, but Leo's oars were automated and retractable, so they took up very little room inside the hull.†
p. 59.8standard suffix: The suffix "-able" means able to be. This is the same pattern you see in words like breakable, understandable, and comfortable.
- The oars retracted.†
p. 115.3 *
- The Argo II set down in the grassy field and the oars retracted.†
p. 383.8
Definitions:
-
(1)
(retract) to take back; or to move back or inin various senses, including:
- to take back something previously said -- such as a promise or opinion
- to move back or in -- such as an airplane's landing gear, or pulling your hand back after being burned
- in surgery, the use of a medical instrument to draw skin or an organ back out of the way
-
(2)
(meaning too rare to warrant focus) meaning too rare to warrant focus:
Less commonly, in phonetics retract references changing the sound of a vowel by pulling the tongue back.