CONTAINS

Contains is the third-person singular present tense of the verb contain. It means to have something inside or within, to enclose, or to include as a component of a whole. The term can describe physical objects as in “The bottle contains juice,” or abstract content as in “The report contains several new findings.” It can also express restriction or control, as in “The plan contains a budget” or “Containment efforts aim to limit the spread.”

Etymology traces contains back to the Latin continere, “to hold together,” from com- “with” + tenere “to hold,” with transmission through Old French contenir and into Middle English. The noun containment developed later to denote the act or state of containing, and the adjective contained parallels related uses.

In specialized contexts, contains has particular meanings. In mathematics and set theory, if A contains B, then B is a subset of A. In computer science and programming, contains is a common operation or method to test whether a string or collection holds a given element or substring (for example, a string.contains("cat")). In information retrieval and databases, CONTAINS can be an operator for full-text search. The term is often contrasted with synonyms such as include, comprise, and enclose, which carry slightly different emphases on components, boundaries, and structure.

See also: containment, inclusion, subset.