structure

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

• noun Something made up of a number of parts that are held or put together in a particular way.
• noun The way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole; makeup.
• noun The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity.
• noun Something constructed, such as a building.
• noun The arrangement or formation of the tissues, organs, or other parts of an organism.
• noun An organ or other part of an organism.
• transitive verb To give form or arrangement to.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun The act of building or constructing; a building up; edification.
• noun That which is built or constructed; an edifice or a building of any kind; in the widest sense, any production or piece of work artificially built up, or composed of parts joined together in some definite manner; any construction.
• noun An organic form; the combination of parts in any natural production; an organization of parts or elements.
• noun Mode of building, construction, or organization; arrangement of parts, elements, or constituents: form; make: used of both natural and artificial productions.
• noun Specifically— In biology, manner or mode of organization; construction and arrangement of tissues, parts, or organs as components of a whole organism; structural or organic morphology; organization: as, animal or vegetable structure; the structure of an animal or a plant; the structure of the brain, of a coral, etc.
• noun In geology, various characteristic features, considered collectively, of rocks and of rock-forming minerals, which features differ much in their nature and origin. Stratification, jointing, cleavage, and foliation are among the principal structural peculiarities of rock-masses, which are chiefly to be studied in the field. Some geologists would limit the term structure to petrographic phenomena of this kind, which have been designated as macroscopic rock-structures. The minuter structural details of rocks and their components are in part included under the name structure, and in part under that of texture. Thus, a rock may have a crystalline, granular, spherulitic, perlitic, etc., structure, or a flinty, earthy, glassy, etc., texture. But the usages of geologists differ in the employment of terms of this kind, and there can be no precise limit drawn separating textures from structures. In general, however, the structural peculiarities of a rock are those which specially interest the geologist; the textural belong more properly to the mineralogist. Microstructures, or those details of structure belonging to the constituents of rocks which are in general not to be satisfactorily studied without the aid of the microscope, are peculiarly the field of observation of the lithologist. For macrostructures, see breccia, cleat, cleavage, 3, concretionary, fragmentary, foliation, 6, joint, 2, schist, slate and slaty, and stratification; for microstructures and textures, see amygdaloidal, cryptocrystalline, crystalline, felsophyre, globulite, granitoid, granophyre and granophyric, holocrystalline, massive, 5, microcrystalline, microlith and microlithie, ocellar, pegmatitic, perlitic, porphyritic, scoriaceous, spherulitic, trachytic, vesicular, vitreous, and vitrophyre.
• To form into a structure; organize the parts or elements of in structural form.
• noun In chem., the order of attachment of the atoms which constitute the molecule of a substance. It is expressed by a structural or constitutional formula.
• noun in petrography, a structure produced in metamorphic rocks by the development of small lenses of granular texture in a micaceous laminated mass.

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

• noun rare The act of building; the practice of erecting buildings; construction.
• noun Manner of building; form; make; construction.
• noun Arrangement of parts, of organs, or of constituent particles, in a substance or body.
• noun (Biol.) Manner of organization; the arrangement of the different tissues or parts of animal and vegetable organisms
• noun That which is built; a building; esp., a building of some size or magnificence; an edifice.
• noun See under Columnar.

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

• noun A cohesive whole built up of distinct parts.
• noun The underlying shape of a solid.
• noun The overall form or organization of something.
• noun A set of rules defining behaviour.
• noun computing Several pieces of data treated as a unit.
• noun fishing, uncountable Underwater terrain or objects (such as a dead tree or a submerged car) that tend to attract fish
• noun A body, such as a political party, with a cohesive purpose or outlook.
• noun logic A set along with a collection of finitary functions and relations.
• verb transitive To give structure to; to arrange.

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

• noun the manner of construction of something and the arrangement of its parts
• noun the complex composition of knowledge as elements and their combinations
• noun a thing constructed; a complex entity constructed of many parts
• verb give a structure to
• noun a particular complex anatomical part of a living thing
• noun the people in a society considered as a system organized by a characteristic pattern of relationships