Definitions

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

  • noun A cloth produced especially by knitting, weaving, or felting fibers.
  • noun The texture or quality of such cloth.
  • noun A complex underlying structure.
  • noun A method or style of construction.
  • noun A structural material, such as masonry or timber.
  • noun A physical structure; a building.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • To build; construct; put into form.
  • noun In petrography, the pattern of a rock produced by the shape and arrangement of the crystalline or non-crystalline parts: distinguished from the granularity or size of the parte, and the crystallinity or degree of crystallization. (See quantitative classification of igneous rocks, under rock.)
  • noun A structure of any kind; anything composed of parts systematically joined or connected.
  • noun A woven or felted cloth of any material or style of weaving; anything produced by weaving or interlacing: distinctively called textile fabric.
  • noun Any system of connected or interrelated parts: as, the universal fabric; the social fabric.
  • noun The structure of anything; the manner in which the parts of a thing are united; workmanship; texture; tissue.
  • noun The act of building.

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

  • transitive verb obsolete To frame; to build; to construct.
  • noun The structure of anything; the manner in which the parts of a thing are united; workmanship; texture; make.
  • noun That which is fabricated.
  • noun Framework; structure; edifice; building.
  • noun Cloth of any kind that is woven or knit from fibers, whether vegetable, animal, or synthetic; manufactured cloth.
  • noun rare The act of constructing; construction.
  • noun Any system or structure consisting of connected parts.

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

  • noun originally (construction) structure, building
  • noun An act of construction, especially the erection of a church
  • noun The framework underlying a structure
  • noun A material made of fibers, a textile or cloth.
  • noun The texture of a cloth.
  • noun petrology The appearance of crystalline grains in a rock
  • noun computing Interconnected nodes that look like a textile 'fabric' when viewed collectively from a distance

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

  • noun artifact made by weaving or felting or knitting or crocheting natural or synthetic fibers
  • noun the underlying structure

Etymologies

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

[Middle English fabryke, something constructed, from Old French fabrique, from Latin fabrica, craft, workshop, from faber, fabr-, workman, artificer.]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

From French fabrique, from Latin fabrica ("a workshop, art, trade, product of art, structure, fabric"), from faber ("artisan, workman").

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