infrastructure

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He wants to put millions in repairing our infrastructure, he has never said that the decay of our infrastructure has been accelerated by the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens who use our schools, hospitals, mass transit, our water, parks, energy and waste disposal, etc.

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Definitions (5)

Toggle American Heritage definitions American Heritage Dictionary (3)

  1. noun An underlying base or foundation especially for an organization or system.
  2. noun The basic facilities, services, and installations needed for the functioning of a community or society, such as transportation and communications systems, water and power lines, and public institutions including schools, post offices, and prisons.
  3. usage note
    The term infrastructure has been used since 1927 to refer collectively to the roads, bridges, rail lines, and similar public works that are required for an industrial economy, or a portion of it, to function. The term also has had specific application to the permanent military installations necessary for the defense of a country. Perhaps because of the word's technical sound, people now use infrastructure to refer to any substructure or underlying system. Big corporations are said to have their own financial infrastructure of smaller businesses, for example, and political organizations to have their infrastructure of groups, committees, and admirers. The latter sense may have originated during the Vietnam War in the use of the word by military intelligence officers, whose task it was to delineate the structure of the enemy's shadowy organizations. Today we may hear that conservatism has an infrastructure of think tanks and research foundations or that terrorist organizations have an infrastructure of people sympathetic to their cause. The Usage Panel finds this extended use referring to people to be problematic, however. Seventy percent of the Panelists find it unacceptable in the sentence FBI agents fanned out to monitor a small infrastructure of persons involved with established terrorist organizations.

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Examples (50)

  • But protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. —  beSpacific
  • He wants to put millions in repairing our infrastructure, he has never said that the decay of our infrastructure has been accelerated by the 12 to 20 million illegal aliens who use our schools, hospitals, mass transit, our water, parks, energy and waste disposal, etc. —  Grand Island Independent Home RSS
  • Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cybersecurity review, which is to be completed next week. —  Top Stories - Google News
  • Your infrastructure is always available and completely fault tolerant. —  Latest News from Virtualization Journal
  • Protecting the electrical grid and other infrastructure is a key part of the Obama administration's cyber-security review, which is to be completed next week. —  Home | Mail Online
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