information

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

• noun Knowledge or facts learned, especially about a certain subject or event. synonym: knowledge.
• noun The act of informing or the condition of being informed; communication of knowledge.
• noun Computers Processed, stored, or transmitted data.
• noun A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome.
• noun Law A formal accusation of a crime made by a public officer rather than by grand jury indictment in instances in which the offense, if a federal crime, is not a felony or in which the offense, if a state crime, is allowed prosecution in that manner rather than by indictment.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun Communication of form or element; infusion, as of an animating or actuating principle.
• noun Knowledge communicated or received; particular intelligence or report; news; notice: as, to get information of a shipwreck.
• noun Knowledge inculcated or derived; known facts or principles, however communicated or acquired, as from reading, instruction, or observation: as, a man of various information; the information gathered from extended travel.
• noun In law:
• noun An official criminal charge presented, usually by the prosecuting officers of the state, without the interposition of a grand jury. Wharton.
• noun A criminal charge made under oath, before a justice of the peace, of an offense punishable summarily.
• noun A complaint, in a qui tam action in a court of common-law jurisdiction, to recover a penalty prescribed by statute or ordinance.
• noun In English law, a complaint in the name of the crown, in a civil action, to obtain satisfaction of some obligation to, or for some injury to the property or property rights of, the crown.
• noun In Scots law, a written argument in court.
• noun In metaphysics, the imparting of form to matter.

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

• noun The act of informing, or communicating knowledge or intelligence.
• noun Any fact or set of facts, knowledge, news, or advice, whether communicated by others or obtained by personal study and investigation; any datum that reduces uncertainty about the state of any part of the world; intelligence; knowledge derived from reading, observation, or instruction.
• noun (Law) A proceeding in the nature of a prosecution for some offense against the government, instituted and prosecuted, really or nominally, by some authorized public officer on behalf of the government. It differs from an indictment in criminal cases chiefly in not being based on the finding of a grand jury. See Indictment.
• noun (Information Theory) A measure of the number of possible choices of messages contained in a symbol, signal, transmitted message, or other information-bearing object; it is usually quantified as the negative logarithm of the number of allowed symbols that could be contained in the message; for logarithms to the base 2, the measure corresponds to the unit of information, the hartley, which is log210, or 3.323 bits; called also information content. The smallest unit of information that can be contained or transmitted is the bit, corresponding to a yes-or-no decision.
• noun (Computers) Useful facts, as contrasted with raw data.

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

• noun formal accusation of a crime
• noun a message received and understood
• noun knowledge acquired through study or experience or instruction
• noun a collection of facts from which conclusions may be drawn
• noun (communication theory) a numerical measure of the uncertainty of an outcome