museum

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

1. n. A building, place, or institution devoted to the acquisition, conservation, study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects having scientific, historical, or artistic value.

Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia

1. n. A building or part of a building appropriated as a repository of things that have an immediate relation to literature, art, or science; especially and usually, a collection of objects in natural history, or of antiquities or curiosities. Among the leading museums may be mentioned —in Italy, the Vatican (developed largely from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries) and the Capitoline at Rome, the Uffizi and Pitti Palace at Florence, the great Museo Nazionale at Naples, and the Brera at Milan; in France, the Louvre (perhaps the most important in the world, opened 1793), the Luxembourg (devoted to recent art), the Trocadéro, and the Hôtel de Cluny at Paris; in Germany, the Zwinger (founded in the eighteenth century) at Dresden, the museums of Berlin, and the Glyptothek and Pinakothek at Munich; in Great Britain, the Ashmolean at Oxford (opened 1683) and the British Museum (the largest in the country, founded 1753) and the South Kensington Museum (illustrative of the industrial arts) at London. There are very notable museums at St. Petersburg, at Madrid, and at Athens; and the museum at Ghizeh (formerly Boulak), near Cairo, has a world-wide reputation. In the United States the chief museums are the Museum of Fine Arts at Boston, the Metropolitan Museum at New York, and the National Museum at Washington. The meaning to the term museum is sometimes extended, especially on the continent of Europe, to include galleries of pictures and sculpture.

Wiktionary

1. n. A building or institution dedicated to the acquisition, conservation, study, exhibition, and educational interpretation of objects having scientific, historical, cultural or artistic value.

GNU Webster's 1913

1. n. A repository or a collection of natural, scientific, or literary curiosities, or of works of art.

WordNet 3.0

1. n. a depository for collecting and displaying objects having scientific or historical or artistic value