abducere

Abducere is a Latin verb meaning to lead away or draw away. It yields English words such as abduct and abduction, and its forms appear in Latin texts to describe moving something or someone away from a position, range, or origin. The etymology is from ab- “away” plus ducere “to lead,” a combination that also yields abductor, meaning the one who leads away.

In Latin grammar, abducere is a third-conjugation verb; the infinitive is abducere, the perfect active is abduxi, the passive participle is abductus, and the passive infinitive is abducī. These forms are used to convey actions of leading away in various tenses and voices, with the sense often literal or figurative.

In anatomy, abducere gives the term abduction, the movement of a limb or other part away from the body's midline. Muscles that perform this action are called abductors (for example, the deltoid muscle abducts the arm; the lateral rectus abducts the eye). The nervus abducens, the sixth cranial nerve, innervates the lateral rectus to enable lateral gaze.

In philosophy and cognitive science, abductive reasoning is a form of inference that seeks the best explanation for a set of observations. Introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, abduction is distinguished from deduction and induction as a method for generating hypotheses that could explain data, rather than proving conclusions. The English noun abduction and the verb abduce share the same Latin root abducere.