MEANING
1. A concluding account that brings together the main points or overall character of something.
2. The process of adding quantities together, or the total produced by that addition.
3. The combination of separate stimuli or responses so that together they produce a larger effect.
Use it for
drawing together the main points of an argument; describing a closing courtroom address; evaluating how well a work represents a whole positionLinks a concluding account with the distinct acts of adding quantities and combining smaller physiological effects. Writing functions: Synthesis, Analysis / Interpretation.
Words that belong together
- a concise summation
- a closing summation
- a summation of the argument
On the page
The final paragraph is a summation of the disagreement, not a resolution of it.
The lawyer’s summation returned to the gap between suspicion and proof.
The index is formed by the summation of scores across five components.
Simple summation gives equal weight to each item, an assumption the authors discuss explicitly.
The textbook contrasts temporal summation with the combined effect of signals arriving from different locations.
Word forms
- Base
- summation
Usage notes
Noun: summation; plural summations. Countable for a summary or calculation, sometimes uncountable for a process. Legal usage is especially American. Register: formal. Commonness: moderately common (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
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