Hello, you have come here looking for the meaning of the word minus. In DICTIOUS you will not only get to know all the dictionary meanings for the word minus, but we will also tell you about its etymology, its characteristics and you will know how to say minus in singular and plural. Everything you need to know about the word minus you have here. The definition of the word minus will help you to be more precise and correct when speaking or writing your texts. Knowing the definition ofminus, as well as those of other words, enriches your vocabulary and provides you with more and better linguistic resources.
On the third day a Master Barnard brings me up a slate full of plusses, minusses, x, y, z’s, and other letters of the alphabet, in a most amiable algebraical confusion.
He valued Roderick’s friendship with the highest value he put on anything nowadays. Over the years they had assessed each other’s plusses and minusses and settled for the difference.
2015, Peter Wyeth, “ Reason”, in The Matter of Vision: Affective Neurobiology & Cinema, New Barnet, Herts.: John Libbey Publishing Ltd; Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, →ISBN, page 113:
As with LCR tout court the question is less to do with the plusses and minusses of the individual ideologies in themselves than in their relationship with their opposite numbers, in this case of Reason with Emotion.
The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout § Translations.
1808–10, William Hickey, Memoirs of a Georgian Rake, Folio Society 1995, p. 301:
The races being finished, we left Epsom for London, Mordaunt's natural vile temper not being at all improved by being three hundred pounds minus by the week's speculation .
1981 March, Kevin F Collis, Cognitive Development, Mathematics Learning, Information Processing and a Refocusing, Madison, Wis.: Wisconsin Research and Development Center for Individualized Schooling, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, page 9:
For example, in solving the following equation, x + 4 = 9, the child using the negating mechanism will reason, "minussing 4" undoes "plussing 4" therefore, if x + 4 = 9 then x = 5 and will not see any point in using any intermediate steps.
1990, William T. Scott, “Systems and structures”, in The Possibility of Communication (Approaches to Semiotics; 87), Berlin, New York, N.Y.: Mouton de Gruyter, →ISBN, page 38:
(The terms positive and negative feedback are now part of everyday language where the meanings are reversed: in cybernetic systems, positive feedback is undesirable for it indicates that the discrepancy is “plussing,” rather than “minussing” to zero.)
2011, Laura Christine Bofferding, Expanding the Numerical Central Conceptual Structure:
Four plus one is 5 and you go down because it's minusing, […]
2012, Jennifer S. Thom, “Opening Mathematical Spaces of Their Own”, in Re-Rooting the Learning Space: Minding Where Children’s Mathematics Grow (New Directions in Mathematics and Science Education; 21), Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, →ISBN, page 299:
“But you also minussed! … Sam… Sam also minussed seventy-two but he also… one hundred forty-four minus seventy-two equals seventy-two. He also minussed the seventy-two.”
^ “minus”, in Collins COBUILD English Language Dictionary, London: Collins, 1987, published 1992, →ISBN, page 921, column 1: “The plural can be either minusses or minuses.”
“minus”, in Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (1879) A Latin Dictionary, Oxford: Clarendon Press
sin in Enrico Olivetti, editor (2003-2024), Dizionario Latino, Olivetti Media Communication
“minus”, in Charlton T. Lewis (1891) An Elementary Latin Dictionary, New York: Harper & Brothers
minus in Charles du Fresne du Cange’s Glossarium Mediæ et Infimæ Latinitatis (augmented edition with additions by D. P. Carpenterius, Adelungius and others, edited by Léopold Favre, 1883–1887)