sum
/sʌm
/noun
1A particular amount of money: they could not afford such a sum...
- Is it right to spend vast sums of money funding expensive conferences?
- Most Japanese currently hold large sums of money in secure savings accounts that yield zero interest.
- The conman asks the person contacted to contribute a small sum of money to speed up the release of the funds.
Synonyms
amount, quantity, volume
amount of money, price, charge, fee, cost, tariff
2 (the sum of) The total amount resulting from the addition of two or more numbers, amounts, or items: the sum of two prime numbers...
- A perfect number is defined to be one which is equal to the sum of its aliquot parts.
- In fact the Egyptians only had fractions of this type and if the answer had not involved a unit fraction then the Egyptians would have written the fractional part as the sum of unit fractions.
- Find a right triangle having the property that the hypotenuse equals the sum of one leg plus the altitude on the hypotenuse.
Synonyms
total, sum total, grand total, tally, aggregate, summation, gross;
answer
2.1The total amount of something that exists: the sum of his own knowledge...
- Tipped to tumble, Motherwell now surf the wave of just one loss in six games thanks to an unexpected capacity to maximise the sum of their unremarkable talents and convert it resolutely into a winning equation.
- It's because critics of homosexuality just can't see the sum of human perfection that is gayness and all its works and ways.
- The Bellini is an idea not the sum of its content.
Synonyms
entirety, totality, total, whole, aggregate, summation, beginning and end, alpha and omega, be-all and end-all
informal whole shebang, whole caboodle, whole shooting match, {lock, stock, and barrel}
3An arithmetical problem, especially at an elementary level: we did sums at school, Mummy do your sums, then the shock will not be too great...
- You saw crates of certain sizes, and then you would do your sums and then do your deductions from that.
- Have you ever wondered why your children seem to do their sums upside-down nowadays?
- She said: ‘I still have to do my sums and see if it is still a possibility for me.’
Synonyms
arithmetical problem, problem, calculation, reckoning, tally, question;
(sums) arithmetic, mathematics, figures, numbers, computation
British informal maths
North American informal math
verb (sums, summing, summed) [with object]
technical Find the sum of (two or more amounts): if we sum these equations we obtain X...
- The amount of total non-structural carbohydrates was calculated by summing the amount of starch and soluble sugar.
- Functional group abundance was calculated by summing the abundances of all species in a particular group on a sample date.
- He found the length of an arc of the cycloid using an exhaustion proof based on dissections to reduce the problem to summing segments of chords of a circle which are in geometric progression.
Phrases
in sum
Phrasal verbs
sum up
sum someone/thing up
Origin
Middle English: via Old French from Latin summa 'main part, sum total', feminine of summus 'highest'.
The sums you did at school and the summing up of a judge are linked by the fact they both come from Latin summa which meant both ‘main part’ and ‘total’, formed from summus ‘highest’. Summary (Late Middle English) and summit (Late Middle English) are from the same source.