shrink
High doses of B vitamins may slow the rate of brain shrinkage in older people.
The town is built on clay soil and this is slowly drying out and causing shrinkage.
The treatment caused a 50 percent or greater shrinkage of tumors in 19 percent of patients.

SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases

Becoming and making smaller or less
abridgment
attenuate
attenuated
attenuating
attenuation
compress
contraction
dwindle
dwindling
ease
ease someone's mindidiom
ease up/off
halve
recede
reduce
reducible
reduction
resize
trough
tumble

shrinkage | American Dictionary

shrinkage
noun[ U ]
us/ˈʃrɪŋ·kɪdʒ/
the act or process of becoming smaller:
Financial support for the university has undergone substantial shrinkage.

shrinkage | Business English

shrinkage
noun[ U ]
uk /ˈʃrɪŋkɪdʒ/us
the process or amount by which something becomes smaller or less:
Conservatives are not happy about the private sector's shrinkage and the public sector's expansion.
shrinkage in sthA permanent shrinkage in supplies would severely damage today's oil-based economy.
shrinkage of sthHe expects employment to grow by 1.9% this year compared to a shrinkage of 0.4% last year.
sales/deficit/brand shrinkageTwo years of double-digit sales shrinkage have hurt the industry.
COMMERCE
the loss of goods for sale because of damage, stealing, etc.:
The retailer's stores lose about $1m a week from shrinkage.
inventory/stock shrinkage

Examples of shrinkage

shrinkage
Why should we then enforce shrinkage if the data provide evidence that some special high-frequency components are statistically significant or unlikely to be noise?
The nuclei of some of them express signs of shrinkage and pyknotic degeneration.
There had been notable shrinkage in the community over the years, evidenced by many closed shops.
Although induction chemotherapy can produce tumour shrinkage, benefit in terms of local control and survival has been generally disappointing.
The demand for estate hands was, of course, insufficient to offset the shrinkage of farm work.
Section 4 introduces nonlinear estimation (nonlinear shrinkage to be more exact) and the powerful concept of oracle inequality.
In addition to the problem of collapse, all lung specimens had been fixed in formalin, which can produce tissue shrinkage of up to 30%.
Enucleation caused more column shrinkage than eyelid suture at age 5 weeks.
Magnetic resonance imaging using echoplanar imaging may eventually be able to differentiate between shrinkage and plateauing in growth with serial, accurate tumour/organ volume measurements.
For example, there is shrinkage associated with the change of state (from liquid to solid).
In my model, persistent payment uncertainty, not actual disruption of credit chains, causes shrinkage of the division of labor.
The same period witnessed the greatest shrinkage of fishing space available to the traditional fishermen because of the proliferation of mechanized boats.
This could potentially obviate the need for detailed calculations in the practical matter of estimating pore shrinkage times for a given packing.
Shrinkage of the molten metal within the mould occurs as it solidifies because of the greater density of solid to molten metal.
Shrinkage techniques and use of currency as the money variable in our models led to improved forecasts.
See all examples of shrinkage
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