The most common and most likely answer to this crossword clue is the 3 letter word ABS
I've seen this crossword clue in The Times
A
B
S
More clues leading to the result ABS
- Muscles stopping system
- Sailor's muscles?
- Like swallowing first of beers in six-pack?
- Blood types associated with small muscles
- What may stop you getting a six-pack?
- Sailor’s muscles
- Rabbis regularly builds muscles
- Husband’s middle reverting to six-pack
- Vehicular safety feature taxis ignored initially
- Beers emptied along with a six-pack?
Buddy explains!
The straight part
We know that "Sailor's/muscles" is the straight/definition part of the clue. The straight part is often a synonym or definition, in this case sailor's/muscles = abs.The cryptic/wordplay part
In cryptic crossword there's often an wordplay/cryptic part as well.This part involves a more complex hint, such as an anagram, homophone, hidden word, etc.
Sadly, We don't have an explanation for this specific crossword clue yet.
What does ABS mean?
ABS noun- Abdominal muscle.
- An abscess caused by injecting an illegal drug, usually heroin.
- To abseil.
- The early stages of; the beginning process; the start.
- (now rare outside medicine) To miscarry; to bring forth (non-living) offspring prematurely.
- To cause a premature termination of (a fetus); to end a pregnancy before term.
- To end prematurely; to stop in the preliminary stages; to turn back.
- To stop or fail at something in the preliminary stages.
- To become checked in normal development, so as either to remain rudimentary or shrink away wholly; to cease organic growth before maturation; to become sterile.
- To cause an organism to develop minimally; to cause rudimentary development to happen; to prevent maturation.
- To abandon a mission at any point after the beginning of the mission and prior to its completion.
- To terminate a mission involving a missile or rocket; to destroy a missile or rocket prematurely.
- To terminate a process prior to completion.
- Initialism of absolute value function.
- Thermodynamic temperature; temperature measured on an absolute scale such as the Kelvin scale.
- Derived; extracted.
- Drawn away; removed from; apart from; separate.
- Not concrete: conceptual, ideal.
- Difficult to understand; abstruse; hard to conceptualize.
- Separately expressing a property or attribute of an object that is considered to be inherent to that object: attributive, ascriptive.
- Pertaining comprehensively to, or representing, a class or group of objects, as opposed to any specific object; considered apart from any application to a particular object: general, generic, nonspecific; representational.
- Absent-minded.
- Pertaining to the formal aspect of art, such as the lines, colors, shapes, and the relationships among them.
- Insufficiently factual.
- Apart from practice or reality; vague; theoretical; impersonal; not applied.
- (grammar) As a noun, denoting an intangible as opposed to an object, place, or person.
- Of a class in object-oriented programming, being a partial basis for subclasses rather than a complete template for objects.