Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun The act of founding, especially the establishment of an institution with provisions for future maintenance.
- noun The basis on which a thing stands, is founded, or is supported. synonym: base.
- noun Funds for the perpetual support of an institution; an endowment.
- noun An institution founded and supported by an endowment.
- noun A cosmetic used as a base for facial makeup.
- noun A woman's supporting undergarment, such as a corset or girdle.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun In ship-building, any part of a ship's structure which is built up or specially reinforced to support heavy weights, as engines and boilers, turrets, guns, boat-cranes, etc.
- noun The act of founding, originating, or beginning to raise or build; the act of establishing.
- noun The solid ground or substructure on which the walls of a building rest; also, the lowest division of the building or wall, which is generally below the surface of the ground.
- noun Hence The basis or groundwork of anything; that on which anything stands and by which it is supported or confirmed.
- noun A fund invested for a benevolent or charitable purpose; a donation or legacy for the support of an institution, as a school or hospital, or of some specific object, as a college professorship, a ward in a hospital, etc.; an endowment.
- noun That which is founded or established by endowment; an endowed institution or charity.
- noun In crochet, knitting, etc., the first stitches put upon the needles, to which all that follows is secured.
- noun Same as
foundation-muslin and -net. - noun In apiculture, a sheet of wax, artificially shaped to resemble the foundation of a comb, attached to the slats or bars of a hive, or placed in a honey-frame, to induce the bees to build combs where desired; a guide-comb.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- noun The act of founding, fixing, establishing, or beginning to erect.
- noun That upon which anything is founded; that on which anything stands, and by which it is supported; the lowest and supporting layer of a superstructure; groundwork; basis.
- noun (Arch.) The lowest and supporting part or member of a wall, including the base course (see Base course (a), under
Base , n.) and footing courses; in a frame house, the whole substructure of masonry. - noun A donation or legacy appropriated to support a charitable institution, and constituting a permanent fund; endowment.
- noun That which is founded, or established by endowment; an endowed institution or charity.
- noun See Base course, under
Base , n. - noun an open-worked gummed fabric used for stiffening dresses, bonnets, etc.
- noun in England, an endowed school.
- noun to be entitled to a support from the proceeds of an endowment, as a scholar or a fellow of a college.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun The act of
founding , fixing, establishing, or beginning toerect . - noun That upon which anything is founded; that on which anything stands, and by which it is supported; the lowest and supporting layer of a superstructure;
groundwork ; basis;underbuilding . - noun architecture The lowest and supporting part or member of a wall, including the base course and footing courses; in a frame house, the whole substructure of masonry.
- noun A donation or legacy appropriated to support a charitable institution, and constituting a permanent fund; endowment.
- noun That which is founded, or established by endowment; an endowed institution or charity.
- noun cosmetics
Cosmetic cream roughlyskin -colored , designed to make theface appear uniform in color andtexture .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun lowest support of a structure
- noun an institution supported by an endowment
- noun the fundamental assumptions from which something is begun or developed or calculated or explained
- noun the act of starting something for the first time; introducing something new
- noun education or instruction in the fundamentals of a field of knowledge
- noun a woman's undergarment worn to give shape to the contours of the body
- noun the basis on which something is grounded
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Support
Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word foundation.
Examples
-
Bush tells another bald-faced whopper, claims he has laid the 'foundation of peace'! yahooBuzzArticleHeadline = 'Bush tells another bald-faced whopper, claims he has laid the \'foundation of peace\'! '
Bush tells another bald-faced whopper, claims he has laid the 'foundation of peace'! 2008
-
All cards in the Army and Navy are equally available if played in pairs (_i. e._, one black and one red), but no card of either color can be played on a foundation _unless a card of the other color is played at the same time on another foundation_.
Lady Cadogan's Illustrated Games of Solitaire or Patience New Revised Edition, including American Games Adelaide Cadogan
-
But its main foundation is a realisation that in fact Britain is a part of Europe, whether we like it or not; that what happens in Europe affects our destiny profoundly, as two world wars have witnessed; and that we deceive ourselves if we pretend otherwise.
-
So I decided to look up the term foundation on the online Oxford English Dictionary.
-
This foundation is the largest funding source for radical anti-gun groups in the country.
Why Are The Ammo Shelves Empty? What, Exactly, Are People Afraid Of? 2009
-
This foundation is the largest funding source for radical anti-gun groups in the country.
Why Are The Ammo Shelves Empty? What, Exactly, Are People Afraid Of? 2009
-
Filing the brief isn ` t the only FSF contribution, p2pnet noted, pointing out the foundation is also working with Recording Industry vs The People ` s Ray Beckerman on the expert witness fund, which has helped RIAA victim Jamie Thomas, among others.
-
Here's the thing - one of the claims of this foundation is a 16-hour time frame in which it promises to stay put.
Ethical Testing kittenpie 2007
-
Here's the thing - one of the claims of this foundation is a 16-hour time frame in which it promises to stay put.
Archive 2007-02-01 kittenpie 2007
-
What really shook me from my foundation is the fact that there really were 12 awesome tips, things fathers would never figure out on their own.
Archive 2007-05-01 2007
-
A foundation model is anymodel that is trained on broad data (generally using self-supervision at scale) that can be adapted(e.g., fine-tuned) to a wide range of downstream tasks; current examples include BERT [Devlin et al .2019], GPT-3 [Brown et al . 2020], and CLIP [Radford et al . 2021].
-
Many of these models are described as foundation models. This term, coined in 2021 by researchers at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, broadly describes AI models that acquire the capacity to perform well across a range of different problems through a process of ‘pretraining’ on enormous unannotated datasets.
Foundation models build on ChatGPT tech to learn the fundamental language of biology - Nature Biotechnology Michael Eisenstein 2024
-
Wang is one of a growing number of scientists who see ‘foundation models’ as a powerful solution. The term describes AI algorithms that go through a pre-training process in which they are fed tremendous amounts of unlabelled data.
Self-driving laboratories, advanced immunotherapies and five more technologies to watch in 2025 Michael Eisenstein 2025
Comments
Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.