Elision

Research

The deliberate omission of a sound, syllable, or section of text; in academic writing, the glossing-over of a step in an argument — appearing as smooth continuity while actually concealing a logical gap.

Sources

1. Merriam-Webster — elision merriam-webster.com accessed 17 September 2026

Merriam-Webster gives a phonetic sense — “the use of a speech form that lacks a final or initial sound which a variant speech form has (such as ’s instead of is in there’s)” and “the omission of an unstressed vowel or syllable in a verse to achieve a uniform metrical pattern” — and then the general one: “the act or an instance of omitting something”. From Late Latin elision-, elisio, from Latin elidere. First recorded circa 1586. The critical use above, where an elision is something quietly left out of an account, runs on that second sense rather than the metrical one.

Merriam-Webster is cited here as the dictionary of record. Where a lexicon entry defines a word rather than a position, a dictionary is the primary source for it — there is no other body with standing over what a word means. The reading of how the term is used in research writing, above, is this lexicon’s own.

Related terms

• Abbreviation
• Abstract
• Abstraction
• Academic Database
• Analysis
• Annotation

Rewritten from a truncated AJG archive entry, August 2026.