format

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

• noun A plan for the organization and arrangement of a specified production.
• noun The material form or layout of a publication.
• noun The arrangement of data for storage or display.
• noun A method for achieving such an arrangement.
• transitive verb To plan or arrange in a specified form.
• transitive verb To divide (a disk) into marked sectors to allow for the storage of data.
• transitive verb To determine the arrangement of (data) for storage or display.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun In printing, the shape and size of a book, as, for example, duodecimo, octavo, quarto, folio, etc.
• noun In painting, engraving, etc., the relation between length and breadth of surface.

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

• transitive verb to set into a specific format; -- of printed matter or data recorded on a data soorage medium.
• noun (Print.) The shape and size of a book or other printed publication; hence, its external form.
• noun (Print.) the arrangement of the parts of a printed page, such as text and graphics.
• noun (Computers) The pattern of organization of information in an electronic storage medium, such as the number and size of records, or the size, spacing, or separation symbols for fields in a record. A computer file, for example, may be in fixed-length format, in which each field or record occupies the same number of bytes, or in variable-length format, in which the lengths of fields or records varies. The number of formats are unlimited, being specifiable at will by programmers or in some cases by the users of programs.
• noun The general organization, form, or plan for anything, such as an organized social, political, or entertainment event.

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

• noun The layout of a document.
• noun hence The form of presentation of something.
• noun computing A file type.
• verb To create or edit the layout of a document.
• verb Change a document so it will fit onto a different type of page.
• verb computing To prepare a mass storage medium for initial use, erasing any existing data in the process.

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

• noun the general appearance of a publication
• noun the organization of information according to preset specifications (usually for computer processing)
• verb divide (a disk) into marked sectors so that it may store data
• verb set (printed matter) into a specific format
• verb determine the arrangement of (data) for storage and display (in computer science)