attribute

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

• transitive verb To regard as arising from a particular cause or source; ascribe.
• transitive verb To regard (a work, for example) as belonging to or produced by a specified agent, place, or time.
• noun A quality or characteristic inherent in or ascribed to someone or something.
• noun An object associated with and serving to identify a character, personage, or office.
• noun Grammar A word or phrase syntactically subordinate to another word or phrase that it modifies; for example, my sister's and brown in my sister's brown dog.

from The Century Dictionary.

• To ascribe; impute; consider as belonging or as due; assign.
• Synonyms Attribute, Ascribe, Refer, Impute, Charge, have two meanings in common: they may assign some attribute, quality, or appurtenance to a person or thing, or they may connect different things, as an effect with its cause. Refer is the weakest. Attribute is stronger: as, to attribute omniscience to God; to attribute failure to incompetence. Ascribe, being most manifestly figurative, is the strongest and most common; it is rarely used in a bad sense. That which is imputed in the first sense named is generally but not always bad: as, to impute folly to a man. To impute anything good seems an archaic mode of expression. Impute is not very common in the second sense: as, to impute one's troubles to one's follies. The theological meaning of impute, that of laying to a person's account something good or bad that does not belong to him, has affected but little the popular use of the word. That which is charged, in either of the senses named, is bad: as, “His angels he charged with folly,” Job iv. 18; I charged it to their youth and inexperience. The word is a strong one, on account of its connection with legal processes, etc.
• noun In logic, that which is predicated or affirmed of a subject; a predicate; an accident.
• noun A character inseparable from its subject.
• noun A characteristic or distinguishing mark; especially, an excellent or lofty quality or trait: as, wisdom and goodness are his attributes.
• noun In the fine arts, a symbol of office, character, or personality: thus, the eagle is the attribute of Jupiter.
• noun Reputation; honor.
• noun In grammar, an attributive word; a word denoting an attribute.

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

• transitive verb To ascribe; to consider (something) as due or appropriate (to); to refer, as an effect to a cause; to impute; to assign; to consider as belonging (to).
• noun That which is attributed; a quality which is considered as belonging to, or inherent in, a person or thing; an essential or necessary property or characteristic.
• noun Poetic Reputation.
• noun (Paint. & Sculp.) A conventional symbol of office, character, or identity, added to any particular figure.
• noun (Gram.) Quality, etc., denoted by an attributive; an attributive adjunct or adjective.

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

• noun A characteristic or quality of a thing.
• noun grammar A word that qualifies a noun.
• noun computing The applicable option selection; a variable or a value.
• noun logic That which is predicated or affirmed of a subject; a predicate; an accident.
• noun computing, programming A semantic item with which a method, etc. may be decorated.
• verb To ascribe (something) to a given cause, reason etc.
• verb To associate ownership or authorship of (something) to someone.

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

• verb attribute or credit to
• verb decide as to where something belongs in a scheme
• noun a construct whereby objects or individuals can be distinguished
• noun an abstraction belonging to or characteristic of an entity