subsume

verb — 2 senses

subsume

verb

UK /səbˈsjuːm/ · US /səbˈsuːm/

Etymology Learned borrowing from Medieval Latin subsūmere, from sub- + sūmō (“to take”). Compare English consume.

1

To place (any one cognition) under another as belonging to it; to include or contain something else.

  • Near-synonym: comprise
  • March 14, 2018, Roger Penrose writing in The Guardian, Mind over matter': Stephen Hawking – obituary A few years later (in a paper published by the Royal Society in 1970, by which time Hawking had become a fellow “for distinction in science” of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge), he and I joined forces to publish an even more powerful theorem which subsumed almost all the work in this area that had gone before.
1 more example
  • 1961: J. A. Philip. Mimesis in the Sophistês of Plato. In: Proceedings and Transactions of the American Philological Association 92. p. 453--468. no allusion is made to forms because Plato is subsuming under the class of productive crafts both divine and human imitation;
2

To consider an occurrence as part of a principle or rule.

Derived terms
subsumability, subsumable
Related terms
subsumation, subsumption

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.

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