[ US /ˈæbsənt/ ]
ADJECTIVE
  1. not being in a specified place
  2. lost in thought; showing preoccupation
    the scatty glancing quality of a hyperactive but unfocused intelligence
    an absentminded professor
    an absent stare
  3. nonexistent
    the thumb is absent
    her appetite was lacking
VERB
  1. go away or leave
    He absented himself

How To Use absent In A Sentence

  • Or did her pushy mother and absent father turn her life into a sordid soap opera? Times, Sunday Times
  • But that day isn't going to be now, or any time in the next ten years, absent a major breakthrough.
  • I have typed out some lecture notes for the benefit of those people who were absent last week.
  • A notice posted on the chapel of Carrigtwohill, calling one of those meetings, warned such as absented themselves that they would be marked men, as there was famine in the parish, and they should have food or blood. The History of the Great Irish Famine of 1847 (3rd ed.) (1902) With Notices of Earlier Irish Famines
  • The man who backbites an absent friend, nay, who does not stand up for him when another blames him, the man who angles for bursts of laughter and for the repute of a wit, who can invent what he never saw, who cannot keep a secret - that man is black at heart: mark and avoid him. Northern Rock - Pay staff a bonus with public cash.
  • I go back now and the dialect of the old residents is noticeably absent, replaced by the faux scouse of the Liverpudlian refugees.
  • For the fondness or averseness of the child to some servants, will at any time let one know, whether their love to the baby is uniform and the same, when one is absent, as present. Pamela
  • Local people were conspicuously absent from the meeting.
  • To have shown it to her husband would have been her first impulse; but, besides that he was absent from home, and the matter too delicate to be the subject of correspondence by an indifferent penwoman, Mrs. Butler recollected that he was not possessed of the information necessary to form a judgment upon the occasion; and that, adhering to the rule which she had considered as most advisable, she had best transmit the information immediately to her sister, and leave her to adjust with her husband the mode in which they should avail themselves of it. The Heart of Mid-Lothian
  • This society lacks structural tension. "liminal" and "anti-structure" are absent here.
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