n (economics) A period of economic decline or negativegrowth.
n (biology) A shortening of a muscle when it is used.
n (medicine) A strong and often painful shortening of the uterine muscles prior to or during childbirth.
n (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.
n (context|English orthography) A word with omitted letters replaced by an apostrophe, usually resulting from the above process.