structure
American Heritage Dictionary:
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struc·ture
(strŭk'chər) 
n.
To give form or arrangement to: structure a curriculum; structure one's day.
n.
- Something made up of a number of parts that are held or put together in a particular way: hierarchical social structure.
- The way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole; makeup: triangular in structure.
- The interrelation or arrangement of parts in a complex entity: political structure; plot structure.
- Something constructed, such as a building.
- Biology.
- The arrangement or formation of the tissues, organs, or other parts of an organism.
- An organ or other part of an organism.
To give form or arrangement to: structure a curriculum; structure one's day.
[Middle English, the process of building, from Latin strūctūra, from strūctus, past participle of struere, to construct.]
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An arrangement of designed components that provides strength and stiffness to a built artifact such as a building, bridge, dam, automobile, airplane, or missile. The artifact itself is often referred to as a structure, even though its primary function is not to support but, for example, to house people, contain water, or transport goods. See also Airplane; Automobile; Bridge; Buildings; Dam.
The primary requirements for structures are safety, strength, economy, stiffness, durability, robustness, esthetics, and ductility. The safety of the structure is paramount, and it is achieved by adhering to rules of design contained in standards and codes, as well as in exercising strict quality control over all phases of planning, design, and construction. The structure is designed to be strong enough to support loads due to its own weight, to human activity, and to the environment (such as wind, snow, earthquakes, ice, or floods). The ability to support loads during its intended lifetime ensures that the rate of failure is insignificant for practical purposes. The design should provide an economical structure within the constraints of all other requirements. The structure is designed to be stiff so that under everyday conditions of loading and usage it will not deflect or vibrate to an extent that is annoying to the occupants or detrimental to its function. The materials and details of construction have durability, such that the structure will not corrode, deteriorate, or break under the effects of weathering and normal usage during its lifetime. A structure should be robust enough to withstand intentional or unintentional misuse (for example, fire, gas explosion, or collision with a vehicle) without totally collapsing. A structural design takes into consideration the community's esthetic sensibilities. Ductility is necessary to absorb the energy imparted to the structure from dynamic loads such as earthquakes and blasts. See also Construction engineering; Engineering design.
Common structural materials are wood, masonry, steel, reinforced concrete, aluminum, and fiber-reinforced composites. Structures are classified into the categories of frames, plates, and shells, frequently incorporating combinations of these. Frames consist of “stick” members arranged to form the skeleton on which the remainder of the structure is placed. Plated structures include roof and floor slabs, vertical shear walls in a multistory building, or girders in a bridge. Shells are often used as water or gas containers, in roofs of arenas, or in vehicles that transport gases and liquids. The connections between the various elements of a structure are made by bolting, welding or riveting. See also Composite material; Concrete; Steel; Structural materials.
Barron's Business Dictionary:
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structure
Any constructed improvement to a site. Structures include buildings; fencing and enclosures; garages; gazebos, greenhouses, and kiosks; and sheds and utility buildings.
See also financial structure.
See also financial structure.
| Structuralunemployment, Strips, Strip Development | |
| Student, Subchapter C, Subchapter J |
Barron's Real Estate Dictionary:
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structure
Any constructed improvement to a site.
Example: Structures include:
• buildings
• fencing and enclosures
• garages
• gazebos, greenhouses, and kiosks
• sheds and utility buildings
Example: Structures include:
• buildings
• fencing and enclosures
• garages
• gazebos, greenhouses, and kiosks
• sheds and utility buildings
| Structuralinspection, Strip Development or Strip Shopping Center | |
| Structured Sale, Subagency |
Roget's Thesaurus:
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structure
Oxford Dictionary of Geography:
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structure
The configuration of the rocks of the earth's surface. Structures vary from the small, as in columnar structure, to the large, as in basin and range structure.
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1. A combination of units constructed and so interconnected, in an organized way, as to provide rigidity between its elements.
2. Any edifice.
Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology:
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structure
[Th]
At its most general this refers to the basic framework or form of society. Elements of a physical structure such as an artefact are often associated with function, hence functionalist and structural-functionalist theory treats society as analogous to an organism with each institutional part (religion, economy, etc.) functioning to maintain the whole. Such an approach is related to systems theory, and both have generally received much application in processual archaeology. More particularly, structure refers to the longue durée in Braudel's temporal scheme, the fundamental baseline of a historical period, seen by the earlier Annales historians as essentially geographical or environmental in character. In spite of such refinement of the concept, it is perhaps overworked in the social sciences, ‘structured’ now being used to mean little more than organized, patterned, or non-random.
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1. Any institutionalized social arrangement. The governing bodies of various sports can be regarded as structures.
2. The rules that underlie and create the outward features of a society; the social relations that underpin these superficial features.
Word Tutor:
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structure
IN BRIEF: The arrangement of parts in a substance, body, or system.
I don't try to imagine a God; it suffices to stand in awe of the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.
— Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
LearnThatWord.com is a free vocabulary and spelling program where you only pay for results!
Mosby's Dental Dictionary:
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structure
n
The architectural arrangement of the component parts of a tissue, part, organ, or body. Also the individual components of the body.
Random House Word Menu:
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categories related to 'structuring'
- Order, Hierarchy, and Systems - structuring: act of forming something according to a structure
Wikipedia on Answers.com:
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Structure
"Structures" redirects here. For other uses, see Structure (disambiguation).
Structure is a fundamental, tangible or intangible notion referring to the recognition, observation, nature, and permanence of patterns and relationships of entities. This notion may itself be an object, such as a built structure, or an attribute, such as the structure of society. From a child's verbal description of a snowflake, to the detailed scientific analysis of the properties of magnetic fields, the concept of structure is now often an essential foundation of nearly every mode of inquiry and discovery in science, philosophy, and art.[1] In early 20th-century and earlier thought, form[disambiguation needed 
] often plays a role comparable to that of structure in contemporary thought. The neo-Kantianism of Ernst Cassirer (cf. his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, completed in 1929 and published in English translation in the 1950s) is sometimes regarded as a precursor of the later shift to structuralism and poststructuralism.[2]
The description of structure implicitly offers an account of what a system is made of: a configuration of items, a collection of inter-related components or services. A structure may be a hierarchy (a cascade of one-to-many relationships), a network featuring many-to-many links, or a lattice featuring connections between components that are neighbors in space.
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Types of structure
Physical structure
In engineering and architecture, a structure is a body or assemblage of bodies in space to form a system capable of supporting loads. Physical structures include man-made and natural arrangements. Buildings, aircraft, soap films, skeletons, anthills, beaver dams and salt domes are all examples of physical structures. The effects of loads on physical structures are determined through structural analysis. Structural engineering refers to engineering of physical structures.
Built structures are a subset of physical structures resulting from construction. These are divided into buildings and nonbuilding structures, and make up the infrastructure of a human society. Built structures are composed of structural elements such as columns, beams and trusses. Built structures are broadly divided by their varying design approaches and standards, into categories including Building structures, Architectural structures, Civil engineering structures and Mechanical structures.
Biological structure
Main article: Biological organisation
In biology, structures exist at all levels of organization, ranging hierarchically from the atomic and molecular to the cellular, tissue, organ, organismic, population and ecosystem level. Usually, a higher-level structure is composed of multiple copies of a lower-level structure.
Chemical structure
Main article: Chemical structure
Chemistry is the science treating matter at the atomic to macromolecular scale, the reactions, transformations and aggregations of matter, as well as accompanying energy and entropy changes during these processes. The chemical structure refers to both molecular geometry and to electronic structure. The structural formula of a chemical compound is a graphical representation of the molecular structure showing how the atoms are arranged. A protein structure is the three dimensional coordinates of the atoms within (macro) molecules made of protein.
Musical composition
Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence expressed through time. The term musical form, a type of structure, refers to two related concepts:
- the type of composition (for example, a musical work can have the form of a symphony, a concerto, or other generic type)
- the structure of a particular piece (for example, a piece can be written in binary form, sonata form, as a fugue, etc.)
Social structure
Main article: Social structure
A social structure is a pattern of relations. They are social organizations of individuals in various life situations. Structures are applicable to people in how a society is as a system organized by a characteristic pattern of relationships. This is known as the social organization of the group. Sociologists have studied the changing structure of these groups. Structure and agency are two confronted theories about human behaviour. The debate surrounding the influence of structure and agency on human thought is one of the central issues in sociology. In this context "agency" refers to the capacity of individual humans to act independently and to make their own free choices. "Structure" here refers to those factors such as social class, religion, gender, ethnicity, customs etc. which seem to limit or influence the opportunities that individuals have.
Data structure
Main article: Data structure
In computer science, a data structure is a way of storing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. Often a carefully chosen data structure will allow the most efficient algorithm to be used. The choice of the data structure often begins from the choice of an abstract data type. A well-designed data structure allows a variety of critical operations to be performed, using as few resources, both execution time and memory space, as possible. Data structures are implemented in a programming language as data types and the references (e.g. relationships, links and pointers) and operations that are possible with them. For structure tables and structure functions, see data structure.
See also
- Crystal structure
- Data structure
- Mathematical structure
- Building
- Nonbuilding structure
- Structural analysis
- Structural engineering
- Structural geology
- Protein structure
- Biomolecular structure
References
- ^ Pullan, Wendy (2000). Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-78258-9.
- ^ John Carlos Rowe, "Structure," in Critical Terms for Literary Study, 2nd ed., ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 25.
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
Translations:
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Structure
Dansk (Danish)
n. - struktur, bygningsmåde, opbygning, bygning
v. tr. - strukturere
Nederlands (Dutch)
structuur, (op)bouw, bouwsel, gebouw, structuur aanbrengen
Français (French)
n. - structure, (Constr) construction, édifice, construction
v. tr. - structurer, organiser, (Constr) construire
Deutsch (German)
n. - Struktur, Aufbau, Konstruktion, Bauwerk
v. - strukturieren
Ελληνική (Greek)
n. - δομή, διάρθρωση, κατασκευή, οικοδομή, οικοδόμημα
v. - δομώ, συγκροτώ, διαρθρώνω
Italiano (Italian)
strutturare, struttura
Português (Portuguese)
n. - estrutura (f)
v. - estruturar
Русский (Russian)
структура, здание, строение
Español (Spanish)
n. - estructura, conformación, construcción, relieve
v. tr. - estructurar
Svenska (Swedish)
n. - struktur, byggnad, byggnadsverk, byggnadskomplex
v. - strukturera, ge struktur åt
中文（简体）(Chinese (Simplified))
结构, 建筑物, 构造, 建筑, 组织, 构成
中文（繁體）(Chinese (Traditional))
n. - 結構, 建築物, 構造
v. tr. - 建築, 組織, 構成
한국어 (Korean)
n. - 건물, 구조, 기구
v. tr. - 구성하다, 조직화하다
日本語 (Japanese)
n. - 構造, 構成, 組織, 建物, 組織体
v. - 組み立てる
العربيه (Arabic)
(الاسم) بناء, انشاء, هيكل, بنيه (فعل) أنشأ, نظم, بنى, شيد
עברית (Hebrew)
n. - מבנה, בניין
v. tr. - בנה, גיבש
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American Heritage Dictionary
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition Copyright © 2007, 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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McGraw-Hill Science & Technology Encyclopedia
McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Copyright © 2005 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Barron's Business Dictionary
Dictionary of Business Terms. Copyright © 2007 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Barron's Real Estate Dictionary
Dictionary of Real Estate Terms. Copyright © 2008 by Barron's Educational Series, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Roget's Thesaurus
Roget's II: The New Thesaurus, Third Edition by the Editors of the American Heritage® Dictionary Copyright © 1995 byHoughton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
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Oxford Dictionary of Geography
A Dictionary of Geography. Copyright © Susan Mayhew 1992, 1997, 2004. All rights reserved.
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McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture & Construction
McGraw-Hill Dictionary of Architecture and Construction. Copyright © 2003 by McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
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Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology
The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology. Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine
The Oxford Dictionary of Sports Science & Medicine. Copyright © Michael Kent 1998, 2006, 2007. All rights reserved.
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Structure.
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