Abstractors

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Individuals responsible for extracting and summarizing the main ideas from various forms of written material
2. Persons who distill essential information and summarize content from documents and other written works
3. Individuals who reduce complex written information to its core elements for easier understanding

Etymology: The word is a plain English formation: "abstract" with the agent suffix "-or," meaning one who performs the action. The verb "abstract" comes from Latin "abstrahere," "to draw away," built from "ab-" ("away from") and "trahere" ("to draw"), so the core image is of pulling something out of a larger body. A person who abstracts a text pulls its essential points out of the whole, which is why the term fits people who produce summaries. The suffix has its own journey. Latin "-tor" and "-ator" marked agents, and these passed into Old French as "-eor," which became Middle English "-our." English later spelled the ending "-or," so the same ending that appears in words like "actor" and "editor" sits at the end of "abstractor." The result is a word whose parts are all familiar, assembled into a label for a specific job.

Synonyms: summarizers, extractors