v. 1 draw or pull (out), remove, withdraw, pluck or take out, draw forth, extricate The dentist extracted two teeth I extracted some important papers from your waste-paper basket. 2 draw, derive, deduce, develop, glean, extricate, distil, get, obtain I could extract little sense from her ramblings 3 wrench, wring, wrest, extort, draw (forth), evoke, elicit, extricate, winkle out, worm (out), prise (out), force (out) Using torture, they finally extracted a confession from him She extracted money from her victims by threatening to tell their wives. 4 copy, quote, cite, abstract, select, choose, glean, cull We extracted useful material from some old encyclopedias
n. 5 concentrate, distillate, essence, distillation, quintessence, concentration, extraction, decoction We boiled off the water and used the extract as a salve 6 excerpt, abstract, quotation, citation, clipping, cutting, passage, selection Extracts from other works are printed in smaller type