instruction

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

• noun The act, practice, or profession of instructing.
• noun Imparted knowledge.
• noun An imparted or acquired item of knowledge.
• noun An authoritative direction to be obeyed; an order.
• noun Detailed directions about how to do something.
• noun Computers A sequence of bits that tells a central processing unit to perform a particular operation and can contain data to be used in the operation.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of instructing or teaching; communication of knowledge; education; enlightenment.
• noun Knowledge imparted; edifying discourse or precepts; teaching.
• noun Direction given; order; command; mandate: commonly in the plural.
• noun Synonyms 1 and 2. Training, Discipline, Nurture, Cultivation, Instruction, Teaching, Education; indoctrination, schooling, breeding, advice, counsel. Training is the development of the mind or character or both, or some faculty, at some length, by exercise, as a soldier is trained or drilled. Discipline is essentially the same as training, but more severe. Nurture, by its derivation, expresses a tender, continuous, and protracted training, beginning at an early age. Cultivation, in the active sense, is often used of the training, discipline, or development of some single department of the nature: as, the cultivation of the understanding, the taste, the conscience. (See culture.) Teaching is the general word for the imparting of knowledge: as, the profession of teaching. Instruction has the imparting of knowledge for its object, but emphasizes, more than teaching, the employment of orderly arrangement in the things taught. Tuition is the most external or formal of these words, representing the act. Education is the largest word of all the list, having for its object, like training and discipline, the development of the powers of the man, but generally also a symmetrical development of the whole man, the mind and the moral nature, by instruction, exercise, etc. Education is the word chosen to express the best ideas that men have of the process of teaching and discipline that shall make the wisest, noblest, and most effective kind of man.

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

• noun The act of instructing, teaching, or furnishing with knowledge; information.
• noun That which instructs, or with which one is instructed; the intelligence or information imparted.
• noun Precept; information; teachings.
• noun Direction; order; command.
• noun (Computers) a segment of coded data that is interpreted by a computer as a command to perform an operation or series of operations. The term instruction is applied to both the electronic form of the data as represented in and executed by the computer, and to any line of written computer code which is interpreted as one instruction by a compiler. A computer program is comprised of one or more instructions.

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

• noun uncountable The act of instructing, teaching, or furnishing with information or knowledge.
• noun countable An instance of the information or knowledge so furnished.
• noun countable An order or command.
• noun computing A single operation of a processor defined by an instruction set architecture.

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

• noun a message describing how something is to be done
• noun (computer science) a line of code written as part of a computer program
• noun the activities of educating or instructing; activities that impart knowledge or skill
• noun the profession of a teacher