Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Something that is conveyed or signified; sense or significance.
- n. Something that one wishes to convey, especially by language: The writer's meaning was obscured by his convoluted prose.
- n. An interpreted goal, intent, or end: "The central meaning of his pontificate is to restore papal authority” ( Conor Cruise O'Brien).
- n. Inner significance: "But who can comprehend the meaning of the voice of the city?” ( O. Henry).
- adj. Full of meaning; expressive.
- adj. Disposed or intended in a specified manner. Often used in combination: a well-meaning fellow; ill-meaning intentions.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. That which exists in the mind, view, or contemplation as an aim or purpose; that which is meant or intended to be done; intent; purpose; aim; object.
- n. That which is intended to be or actually is expressed or indicated in any way; the sense or purport of anything, as a word or an allegory, a sign, symbol, act, event, etc.; signification; significance; import.
- n. Understanding; knowledge; remembrance.
- n. Synonyms Design.
- n. Sense, explanation, interpretation, purport, acceptation.
- Significant; expressing thought or purpose: as, a meaning look.
Wiktionary
- v. present participle of mean.
- n. The symbolic value of something.
- n. The significance of a thing.
- n. semantics The objects or concept that a word or phrase denotes, or that which a sentence says.
- n. obsolete intention
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. That which is meant or intended; intent; purpose; aim; object.
- n. That which is signified, whether by act lanquage; signification; sense; import.
- n. rare Sense; power of thinking.
WordNet 3.0
- n. the message that is intended or expressed or signified
- n. the idea that is intended
- adj. rich in significance or implication
Etymologies
- From Middle English mening, menyng, equivalent to mean + -ing. Cognate with Scots mening ("intent, purpose, sense, meaning"), West Frisian miening ("opinion, mind"), Dutch mening ("view, opinion, judgement"), German Meinung ("opinion, view, mind, idea"), Danish and Swedish mening ("meaning, sense, sentence, opinion"), Icelandic meining ("meaning"). (Wiktionary)
Examples
“If by the _meaning_ of a general name are to be understood the things which it is the name of, no general name, except by accident, has a fixed meaning at all, or ever long retains the same meaning.”
A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2)
“_meaning_, and we are aware how these meaning values shift with the stress and turns of thought, so that a given word has a greater or less weight in different sentences or even in different clauses of the same sentence.”
“This reply is problematical in that it implies that the multitude of native speakers of English who reject the logical positivists 'account of meaning somehow cannot see that that sentence is true in virtue of the meaning of the word ˜meaning™ ” which is no technical term but a word of ordinary English.)”
“(_Surely there was mystic meaning in the name_ HELENA, _meaning which was fulfilled when she fled to Troy.”
The Agamemnon of Aeschylus Translated into English Rhyming Verse with Explanatory Notes
“She thought that she could see the dawning realization that she and George “were either the victims of the Americans, or of the Russians, or of both, or, at the most, ‘lampistes’—a term meaning literally railroad employees who swing lanterns when a train pulls out and, by extension, the lowest of the low, who are made to pay for the mistakes or misdeeds of their superiors.””
“Giri ninjo, my Japanese friends taught me when I first came to Japan, is a term meaning loyalty and humility.”
“They note that the difference in meaning is often not great, but - ing emphasises the action or event in itself, while the infinitive places the emphasis more on the results of the action or event (p. 515).”
“Native Americans' name for menhaden was "munnawhatteaug" -- a word meaning fertilizer, biologists say.”
The Washington Post: In Va., the lowly menhaden loses out to striped bass
“Obviously, the original, Latin meaning is the only one that makes sense.”
Matthew Yglesias » For Democrats, Even a 2010 Win Will Feel Like a Loss
“My best guess is a word meaning government by hippopotamus.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘meaning’.
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Visuals
A list of words which yield surprising, beautiful, amusing, or otherwise noteworthy images here on Wordnik.
photochrom, fufluns, thank you, cool l..., postcard, picture postcard, cricket, physiological ill..., Gakuryū Ishii, ametropia, One Froggy Evening, rhodopsin, Santiago Calatrava and 636 more...
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Language
word, sentence, novel, book, novella, vignette, memoir, anthology, paragraph, stanza, poem, haiku and 123 more...
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INTERP - terminology management terms
Terms from the fields of terminology, lexicography, lexicology and corpus linguistics
reworder, rewording, parser, parsing, tagger, tagging, aligner, aligning, content analysis, content analyzer, corpus management, glossary and 546 more...
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RELI - words with Biblical connotations
Words in the Bible evoking biblical stories or with special spiritual meaning. Proper names have been reduced to the minimum.
ark, judgement, holy, saint, baptism, spirit, love, eternal, altar, balsam, covenant, flood and 1115 more...
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Wordplay & Pun
wordplay, pound, conceit, clinch, joke, quibble, equivoque, double-entendre, quillet, calembour, carriwitchet, paranomasia and 90 more...
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EU Buzz - Lisbon Treaty
All words of the Lisbon Treaty
(Persons' names, foreign and grammatical words have been eliminated, MWEs have been split up into individual words. Capitalization has been retained if r...health, follow, condition, meeting, minister, beginning, chapter, information, language, remain, covered, respect and 2614 more...
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gists
words about central ideas and actions
gist, nub, sense, meat, core, essence, heart, crux, pith, marrow, kernel, quintessence and 35 more...
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meaning
bemean, demean, meaningful, meaningless, meant, intermean, misdemeanor, means, cadmean, meanwhile, permeance, idumean and 59 more...
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Happy Therapy
Starting up a therapeutic service? Here are some words you can sprinkle throughout your brochure to sell your particular brand of change.
holistic, integration, nurture, exploration, acceptance, treatment, empower, supportive, teamwork, development, change, community and 14 more...
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capitalcreative's Words
deviltry, visceral, cassanova, assuage, genesis, hot minute, osmosis, wistful, sublime, loathe, farfetched, newfangled and 283 more...
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Holli
Cancer, Mercury, water, moon, dark, emotion, nostalgia, angst, brooding, isolation, shadow, corner and 145 more...
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Basic English Vocabulary
Very basic words for ESL students.
contemplate, container, consumer, consultant, consensus, conscious, conscience, connection, confusion, confront, conflict, confident and 4334 more...
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vic's list
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The things they carried (List 2)
Listening to this as an audio book for the second time. Tim O'Brien uses simple words and phrases to great effect. Very few unfamilar and big words . The writing style reminds me of words from Joh...
The, Things, They, Carried, meant, fond, By necessity,, presented to him, far beyond, against the brick..., reaching, taut and 2940 more...
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Words That Populate My Mind
This is a collection of words I love, old ones that I love the sound of when I repeat them for years and new ones coined in news articles on up and coming trends and technologies - most of them I k...
aroma, mojo, blithely, fringe, fray, synchronicity, doublespeak, buzzword, thoughtcrime, portmanteau, newspeak, oldspeak and 963 more...
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INTERP - VOCABULARY
The vocabulary of conference interpreting. I commend this list to those who want to know more about the profession and to those who wish to organize their knowledge about the profession. To aspirin...
retour language, A-language, B-language, C-language, relay language, take sy on relay, language booth, booth meeting, mic, mike, mission, freelance interpr... and 2086 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for meaning.
oroboros What it means is in yer eye, guy! See philosophy in the flesh Mar 24, 2007
uselessness Dude. Is that poem supposed to mean anything? Mar 23, 2007
oroboros Two experts, to explicate Meaning,
Penned a text called "The Meaning of Meaning",
But the world was perplexed,
So three experts penned next
"The Meaning of Meaning of Meaning"
--Douglas R. Hofstadter Mar 23, 2007