In a sentence
Six example sentences with abacus, each labelled with its topic.
Merchants in Song dynasty China slid the beads of an abacus to total a sale faster than any clerk with a brush.
History
The woodcut shows a rice merchant hunched over his abacus, beads pushed to the top rod as he tallies the harvest.
Art
The foreman on the cathedral site tallied every cartload of stone on an abacus, clicking beads along its rods as the wagons arrived.
Architecture
Long before silicon, the abacus let a trained clerk add faster than the first desktop calculators could print a result.
Technology
Children trained on the abacus later picture its beads in their heads, and researchers watch their fingers twitch as they calculate.
Psychology
In a Kyoto market an elderly shopkeeper still totals purchases on an abacus before handing over a printed receipt.
Travel
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Found in these word lists
Each source is a published word list that contains abacus. No exam board publishes an official GRE, GMAT or SAT list; GMAT words come from GRE lists and the Academic Word List.