Truncated

Truncated is an adjective describing something that has been shortened by removing a part. The word derives from Latin truncare, meaning to prune or lop off. In broad use, it can refer to objects, data, or text that have had portions removed.

In geometry, truncation refers to the operation of cutting off the corners of a solid polyhedron. The resulting figure is a truncated polyhedron, which gains new polygonal faces at the former vertices. For example, a truncated cube has square faces replaced by octagons and triangles, and the process often increases symmetry while increasing the number of faces.

In computing and data processing, truncation denotes shortening by removing characters or digits. String truncation cuts a string to a specified length. Numeric truncation discards the fractional part of a real number, effectively truncating toward zero rather than rounding. In databases, the TRUNCATE TABLE statement removes all rows from a table quickly and typically resets any auto-increment counters, differing from a row-by-row DELETE.

In statistics, a truncated distribution is defined only on a restricted range of values and must be renormalized to form a valid probability distribution. Data may be left-truncated or right-truncated when observations fall outside a measurement interval, which can affect inferences and analyses.

Other uses include truncation in linguistics, where clipping shortens a word to a shorter form, and in typography or display, where text is truncated to fit available space. The term generally conveys the idea of a part being cut away while leaving the remainder intact.