Definitions

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun chiefly UK Alternative spelling of civilization.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun a society in an advanced state of social development (e.g., with complex legal and political and religious organizations)
  • noun a particular society at a particular time and place
  • noun the social process whereby societies achieve an advanced stage of development and organization
  • noun the quality of excellence in thought and manners and taste

Etymologies

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Examples

  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.

    Archive 2006-10-01 Abhay N 2006

  • Much of what we call civilisation is structure that has developed over time to limit monopolies.

    Wegman report released « Climate Audit 2006

  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves.

    Karl Marx quote from the Communist Manifesto Abhay N 2006

  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves.

    ANC Today 2005

  • It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves.

    ANC Today 2005

  • Every now and then they improve their condition a little and what we call civilisation appears.

    GOD Will Make a Way TERRY RUSH 1995

  • Every now and then they improve their condition a little and what we call civilisation appears.

    GOD Will Make a Way TERRY RUSH 1995

  • With what we call civilisation hundreds of miles away, in a country where law and order are to be regarded more as names than facts, one has a great joy in mere living, intensified doubtless by long hours spent in the saddle, by occasional hard work and curtailed rest, and by the daily sight of the rising sun.

    Morocco S.L. Bensusan

  • Can what they call civilisation be right, if people mayn't die in the room where they were born?

    Howards End 1924

  • Now that process, however necessary, however beneficial, involves some of the chief evils of our present phase of what we call civilisation, partly because it has deteriorated the quality of all human products and partly because it has enslaved mankind, and in so doing deteriorated also his quality. 12 Now we cannot abolish machinery, because machinery lies in the very essence of life and we ourselves are machines.

    On Life and Sex: Essays of Love and Virtue 1921

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