Definitions

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

  • noun The study of the earth's structural features.
  • noun The art or science of construction, especially of large buildings.

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Building, or any assembling of materials in construction, considered as an art: sometimes restricted to the shaping and ornamentation of furniture, cups, and weapons, including the different processes of inlaying, embossing, application, casting, soldering, etc.

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

  • noun The science, or the art, by which implements, vessels, dwellings, or other edifices, are constructed, both agreeably to the end for which they are designed, and in conformity with artistic sentiments and ideas.
  • noun (Geol. & Phys. Geog.) the branch of geology concerned with the rock structures and external forms resulting from the deformation of the earth's crust; also, similar studies of other planets. Also called structural geology.
  • noun a geological theory which considers the earth's crust as divided into a number of large relatively rigid plates, which move relatively independently on the more plastic asthenosphere under the influence of magmatic upwellings, so as to drift apart, slide past, or collide with each other, causing the formation, breakup, or merging of continents, and causing volcanism, the building of mountain ranges, and the subduction of one plate beneath another. In recent decades a large body of data have accumulated to support the theory and provide some details of the mechanisms at work. One set of supporting observations consists of data showing that the continents have slowly moved relative to each other over long periods of time, a phenomenon called continental drift. Africa and South America, for example, have apparently moved apart from a connected configuration at about 2 to 3 cm per year over tens of millions of years.

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

  • noun geology The study of crustal plates and other large-scale structural features of the Earth.
  • noun architecture The science and art of assembling, shaping, or ornamenting materials in construction.

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

  • noun the branch of geology studying the folding and faulting of the earth's crust
  • noun the science of architecture

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