information

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. Knowledge derived from study, experience, or instruction.
2. n. Knowledge of specific events or situations that has been gathered or received by communication; intelligence or news. See Synonyms at knowledge.
3. n. A collection of facts or data: statistical information.
4. n. The act of informing or the condition of being informed; communication of knowledge: Safety instructions are provided for the information of our passengers.
5. n. Computer Science Processed, stored, or transmitted data.
6. n. A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome.
7. n. Law A formal accusation of a crime made by a public officer rather than by grand jury indictment.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. Communication of form or element; infusion, as of an animating or actuating principle.
2. n. Knowledge communicated or received; particular intelligence or report; news; notice: as, to get information of a shipwreck.
3. n. Knowledge inculcated or derived; known facts or principles, however communicated or acquired, as from reading, instruction, or observation: as, a man of various information; the information gathered from extended travel.
4. n. In law:
5. n. An official criminal charge presented, usually by the prosecuting officers of the state, without the interposition of a grand jury. Wharton. This is the sense in which it is more commonly used in American law. In American constitutional law, clauses securing trial by jury in prosecutions by indictment or information are construed as excluding complaints before local magistrates for minor offenses, such as have always been summarily tried.
6. n. A criminal charge made under oath, before a justice of the peace, of an offense punishable summarily.
7. n. A complaint, in a qui tam action in a court of common-law jurisdiction, to recover a penalty prescribed by statute or ordinance.
8. n. In English law, a complaint in the name of the crown, in a civil action, to obtain satisfaction of some obligation to, or for some injury to the property or property rights of, the crown.
9. n. In Scots law, a written argument in court.
10. n. In metaphysics, the imparting of form to matter. In logic the information of a term is the aggregate of characters predicable of it over and above what are implied in the definition. [This meaning is found in Abelard.)

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. The act of informing, or communicating knowledge or intelligence.
2. n. Any fact or set of facts, knowledge, news, or advice, whether communicated by others or obtained by personal study and investigation; any datum that reduces uncertainty about the state of any part of the world; intelligence; knowledge derived from reading, observation, or instruction.
3. n. (Law) A proceeding in the nature of a prosecution for some offense against the government, instituted and prosecuted, really or nominally, by some authorized public officer on behalf of the government. It differs from an indictment in criminal cases chiefly in not being based on the finding of a grand jury. See Indictment.
4. n. (Information Theory) A measure of the number of possible choices of messages contained in a symbol, signal, transmitted message, or other information-bearing object; it is usually quantified as the negative logarithm of the number of allowed symbols that could be contained in the message; for logarithms to the base 2, the measure corresponds to the unit of information, the hartley, which is log210, or 3.323 bits; called also information content. The smallest unit of information that can be contained or transmitted is the bit, corresponding to a yes-or-no decision.
5. n. (Computers) Useful facts, as contrasted with raw data.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. formal accusation of a crime
2. n. a message received and understood
3. n. knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction
4. n. a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn
5. n. (communication theory) a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome