Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun A building, especially one of imposing appearance or size.
  • noun An elaborate conceptual structure.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun A building; a structure; an architectural fabric: applied chiefly to large or fine buildings, public or private.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun A building; a structure; an architectural fabric; -- chiefly applied to elegant houses, and other large buildings.

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

  • noun A building; a structure; an architectural fabric, especially an imposing one; a large or fine building, public or private.
  • noun An abstract structure; a school of thought.

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

  • noun a structure that has a roof and walls and stands more or less permanently in one place

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Middle English, from Old French, from Latin aedificium, from aedificāre, to build : aedis, a building + -ficāre, -fy.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Middle English edifice, from Old French edifice, reborrowed from Latin aedificium ("building"), derived from aedificāre ("to build, establish") (whence also edify).

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Examples

  • The owner of the edifice is a 56 years old landscape architect by the way, and he say an upwards of $12,000 has gone into building thetreehouse.

    The Greatest Treehouse in the World 2009

  • To him this edifice is a beautiful structure, although it will never be finished.

    Owen Chamberlain - Banquet Speech 1960

  • The entire U.S. geopolitical imperial edifice is a house built on sand.

    Big surprise: money wasted « Antiwar.com Blog 2009

  • Successful policies & programs might take decades of hard work to carefully craft & hordes of active & involved supporters to defend them against the forces of reaction & hate while the edifice is being built & occupied.

    Go, Howie, Go! (Blog for Democracy) 2009

  • "That whole rather rickety edifice is being swept away and replaced with a much simpler system," Sampson said.

    Got a legal complaint? Now you can take it to the new legal ombudsman Jill Insley 2010

  • Having the bad luck to ascend to Power just as the whole Washington edifice is swirling down the shithole. ha ha ha

    Matthew Yglesias » Right-Wing “Reporting” 2009

  • The Eiffel-like edifice is modelled on the 1799 Faversham church spire which adopted very similar buttresses in order to soften the blow should it fall into the town as a result of an explosion at the nearby gunpowder works.

    Destination Moon Peter Ashley 2008

  • Even his grand Social Security edifice is under assault by the vandals of the G.O.P. Conservatives insist the cuts are necessary to get the roaring federal budget deficit under control.

    March 2005 2005

  • Now on the one hand, as we have seen, every brick making up this massive conceptual edifice is a friable mixture of untruth, half-truth, hypothesis or assertion.

    Professing Literature: John Guillory's Misreading of Paul de Man 2005

  • The old blueprints were found much later and the reconstructed edifice is a replica of how it was before the bad times.

    notes from the peanut gallery Dean Francis Alfar 2003

Comments

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  • I was reminded of this word through my Spanish studies: "edificio" is much more commonly used than its English counterpart, as we English-speakers are more prone to using "building."

    December 16, 2007