foliation

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. The state of being in leaf.
2. n. Decoration with sculpted or painted foliage.
3. n. Architecture Decoration of an opening with cusps and foils, as in Gothic tracery.
4. n. The act, process, or product of forming metal into thin leaf or foil.
5. n. The act or process of coating glass with metal foil.
6. n. The process of numbering consecutively the leaves of a book or manuscript.
7. n. The leaves so numbered.
8. n. Geology The layered structure common to metamorphic rocks.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. The leafing of plants; vernation; the disposition of the nascent leaves within the bud; also, leafage; foliage.
2. n. A leaf or scale.
3. n. The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, or foil.
4. n. The act or operation of spreading foil over the surface of a piece of glass to form a mirror.
5. n. The state of being foliaceous or foliated.
6. n. In geology, an arrangement of the constituent minerals of a rock in thinly lamellar or often scale-like forms, the result of which is that the mass splits easily in a certain definite direction. Foliation may be congenital with the formation of the rock itself, or posterior to it: in the latter case the epithet foliated indicates a structure not essentially different from that more generally designated as schistose. The relations of foliation to cleavage are somewhat obscure. The essential difference between them appears to be that cleavage is rarely well developed except in fine-grained, argillaceous rock, which by its effects is usually rendered capable of almost indefinite subdivision in one direction, while foliation separates the rock into bands sometimes quite distinct from each other in mineral character, these bands being also not infrequently more or less irregular in thickness and rather lenticular in form. By some geologists it is thought that in foliation a more advanced stage of metamorphism has been reached than that indicated by cleavage; but it is also highly probable that the original lithological and structural character of the mass had much to do with bringing about the observed differences. See schist and schistose.
7. n. In architecture, enrichment with ornamental cusps or groups of cusps, as in the tracery of medieval windows; foils collectively; feathering.
8. n. Arrangement by leaves; specifically, a numbering of the leaves of a book instead of the pages.

Wiktionary

1. n. The process of forming into a leaf or leaves.
2. n. The manner in which the young leaves are disposed within the bud.
3. n. The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, foil, or lamina.
4. n. The act of coating with an amalgam of tin foil and quicksilver, as in making looking-glasses.
5. n. The enrichment of an opening by means of foils, arranged in trefoils, quatrefoils, etc.; also, one of the ornaments.
6. n. The property, possessed by some crystalline rocks, of dividing into plates or slabs, which is due to the cleavage structure of one of the constituents, as mica or hornblende. It may sometimes include slaty structure or cleavage, though the latter is usually independent of any mineral constituent, and transverse to the bedding, it having been produced by pressure.
7. n. topology A set of submanifolds of a given manifold, each of which is of lower dimension than it, but which, taken together, are coextensive with it.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The process of forming into a leaf or leaves.
2. n. The manner in which the young leaves are dispo�ed within the bud.
3. n. The act of beating a metal into a thin plate, leaf, foil, or lamina.
4. n. The act of coating with an amalgam of tin foil and quicksilver, as in making looking-glasses.
5. n. (Arch.) The enrichment of an opening by means of foils, arranged in trefoils, quatrefoils, etc.; also, one of the ornaments. See Tracery.
6. n. (Geol.) The property, possessed by some crystalline rocks, of dividing into plates or slabs, which is due to the cleavage structure of one of the constituents, as mica or hornblende. It may sometimes include slaty structure or cleavage, though the latter is usually independent of any mineral constituent, and transverse to the bedding, it having been produced by pressure.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. the work of coating glass with metal foil
2. n. the production of foil by cutting or beating metal into thin leaves
3. n. (geology) the arrangement of leaflike layers in a rock
4. n. (botany) the process of forming leaves
5. n. (architecture) leaf-like architectural ornament