framework

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A structure for supporting or enclosing something else, especially a skeletal support used as the basis for something being constructed.
2. n. An external work platform; a scaffold.
3. n. A fundamental structure, as for a written work.
4. n. A set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitutes a way of viewing reality.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A structure or fabric for inclosing or supporting anything; a frame; a skeleton: as, the framework of a building; the bones are the framework of the body.
2. n. Structure; constitution; adjusted arrangement; system.
3. n. A kind of fancy work made with yarn of silk or worsted drawn across a frame in two directions, and knotted or otherwise secured at the intersections, producing reticulated patterns, sometimes of considerable elaboration.
4. n. Spinning done on a throstleor ring-frame; also, knitting done on a stocking-frame.

Wiktionary

1. n. The arrangement of support beams that represent a building's general shape and size.
2. n. The larger branches of a tree that determine its shape.
3. n. A basic conceptual structure.
4. n. The identification and categorisation of processes or steps that constitute a complex task or mindset in order to render explicit the tacit and implicit.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The work of framing, or the completed work; the frame or constructional part of anything.
2. n. Work done in, or by means of, a frame or loom.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a structure supporting or containing something
2. n. a hypothetical description of a complex entity or process
3. n. the underlying structure