0 a book, play, or piece of writing that has been made shorter by removing some details or less important information:
1 the act of reducing someone's freedom, rights, etc., or an instance of this:
He says there are laws which are completely unethical and an abridgment of freedom.
The measure establishes a dangerous precedent in the abridgement of human liberty.
I didn't want my work to be merely an abridgment of the hearings.
The document is an English abridgment of the Japanese original.
There seems to be a current enthusiasm for extreme abridgement.
He called the spending limits an abridgment of a party's right to free political expression.
He wrote a research paper on the abridgment of the civil liberties in the United States.
Government secrecy pales in comparison to the secrecy and abridgements of free expression that exist in private companies.
He held that the abridgment of rights for the "common good" is never justifiable.
For the abridgment of 1802 and the second full-length edition of 1810, however, he changed his tune completely.
