Abrasions

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Injuries resulting from scraping or rubbing that damage the skin's surface layer, often leading to irritation or bleeding
2. Skin injuries that occur when the outer layer is worn away through friction, potentially causing redness and discomfort
3. Surface wounds caused by rubbing off the skin's outer layer, often leaving raw or inflamed areas

Etymology: "Abrasions" is the plural of "abrasion," which originally named the act of scraping something away rather than the wound it might leave. The noun comes from Latin "abrādere," meaning "to scrape off," built from "ab-" ("off") and "rādere" ("to scrape"). That Latin verb passed into Medieval Latin as "abrasio," meaning "a scraping," and from there into French as "abrasion," which was in use by 1611. English took the word in the 1650s, first attested in 1656, and it kept its physical sense for a long time: abrasion described wearing down a surface by friction, as in rock worn smooth by water or metal polished by grinding. The sense of a wound on the skin came later, when the noun was applied to the damage that friction does to living tissue, so a graze is a kind of abrasion in the same way a worn stone is.

Synonyms: scrapes, scratches, wounds

Antonyms: heals