(medicine) A strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth.
(linguistics) A process whereby one or more sounds of a freemorpheme (a word) are lost or reduced, such that it becomes a bound morpheme (a clitic) that attaches phonologically to an adjacent word.
(English orthography) A word with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe, usually resulting from the above process.
