Home / Words / truncateNo. 0288

truncate

/ˈtrʌŋkeɪt/·verb

to cut something short by removing its end
Fig. 1 — The log rides the rollers in with a ragged head of splinters and branch-stubs.
01Definition

To truncate is to cut a thing short by lopping off its end — and the cut is blunt: what remains stops flat, without taper or trailing off. From Latin truncare, 'to lop', built on truncus, the trunk — a tree with its top taken is the original truncated thing. Geometry keeps the flat-top sense (a truncated cone), computing clips titles and file names with an ellipsis, and statisticians truncate a data range by chopping its tail clean off.

02In use
  • iThe mill blade truncates each log to an even, squared end.
  • iiLong titles are truncated to fit the screen, an ellipsis marking the cut.
  • iiiThe interview was truncated by a fire alarm halfway through the second question.
03Collocations
  • a truncated cone
  • truncated text
  • an abruptly truncated meeting
  • truncate the data
  • a truncated version

Family truncated (adjective) · truncation (noun)

04Relations

=shorten, curtail, cut, clip, lop

≠extend, lengthen, prolong

06TOEFL & IELTS

A precision verb: what is truncated loses its END, and the cut is abrupt — a truncated pyramid has a flat top, a truncated meeting ends before its agenda does. Computing keeps it busiest: file names, headlines and decimals are truncated, and truncating 12.987 gives 12.9 — cut, not rounded, a distinction numeric passages test. Register is technical-formal; in everyday prose 'cut short' does the same job. And the stress crosses the Atlantic: American English says TRUN-cate, British English trun-CATE.

07Asked
What is the difference between truncating and rounding a number?
Truncation just drops the digits: 20.98752 truncated to two places is 20.98, full stop. Rounding looks at what it is about to discard and may step up: the same number rounds to 20.99. Truncation therefore always moves toward zero — which is why spreadsheets ship a separate TRUNC function: rounding is the default, and sometimes you need the cut instead.
What is a truncated cone called?
A frustum — the solid left when a cone or pyramid is cut by a plane parallel to its base and the top is removed; a lampshade and a bucket are everyday frustums. Strictly, every frustum is a truncated cone but not every truncated cone is a frustum: tilt the cut and the name no longer applies. The log in the scene above gets the everyday version — one straight cut, one flat face.
What is the difference between truncate and abbreviate?
Abbreviate produces a recognised short form: Doctor becomes Dr, as soon as possible becomes ASAP — the result is a conventional stand-in. Truncate just chops at a point, conventions be damned: a headline cut at forty characters ends wherever character forty falls. That is why truncated text needs an ellipsis to apologise for itself, and abbreviations do not. (For trimming whole works, English uses abridge.)
What does it mean when text is truncated?
The string was longer than its container, so the display cut it and usually marked the cut with an ellipsis. Interfaces choose where to truncate: at the end for titles, but often mid-string for file names — 'quarterly_rep…final.xlsx' — because the extension carries information worth keeping. Databases truncate too, silently, when a value exceeds a column's length: a genuine data-loss trap.
Is it TRUN-cate or trun-CATE?
Both, by geography: American English stresses the first syllable, TRUN-cate; British English commonly stresses the second, trun-CATE. It belongs to a small family of two-syllable -ate verbs that split this way — dictate, locate, rotate, migrate all front their stress in America and can shift it back in Britain. Neither is wrong; consistency with your accent model is what matters.
Why is the SQL command called TRUNCATE?
Because it does to a table what the blade does to the log: removes everything after a point — in this case, all the rows — while leaving the structure standing. TRUNCATE TABLE empties the table but keeps its columns, indexes and definition, which is exactly the word's promise: the end is gone, the trunk remains. A file can likewise be truncated to zero length without being deleted.