What does field mean?

What does field mean?. The world's largest and most trusted free online dictionary: definitions, synonyms, word origins, example sentences, word games, and more.

What does field mean? - The Free Dictionary

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[n] a piece of land cleared of trees and usually enclosed(he planted a field of wheat)[v] catch or pick up (balls) in baseball or cricket[n] a region where a battle is being (or has been) fought(they made a tour of Civil War battlefields)[v] play as a fielder[n] somewhere (away from a stud

field

field - The Free Dictionary

[n] a piece of land cleared of trees and usually enclosed
(he planted a field of wheat)

[v] catch or pick up (balls) in baseball or cricket

[n] a region where a battle is being (or has been) fought
(they made a tour of Civil War battlefields)

[v] play as a fielder

[n] somewhere (away from a studio or office or library or laboratory) where practical work is done or data is collected
(anthropologists do much of their work in the field)

[v] answer adequately or successfully
(The lawyer fielded all questions from the press)

[n] a branch of knowledge
(in what discipline is his doctorate? teachers should be well trained in their subject anthropology is the study of human beings)

[v] select (a team or individual player) for a game
(The Buckeyes fielded a young new quarterback for the Rose Bowl)

[n] the space around a radiating body within which its electromagnetic oscillations can exert force on another similar body not in contact with it

[n] a particular kind of commercial enterprise
(they are outstanding in their field)

[n] a particular environment or walk of life
(his social sphere is limited it was a closed area of employment he's out of my orbit)

[n] a piece of land prepared for playing a game
(the home crowd cheered when Princeton took the field)

[n] extensive tract of level open land
(they emerged from the woods onto a vast open plain he longed for the fields of his youth)

[n] (mathematics) a set of elements such that addition and multiplication are commutative and associative and multiplication is distributive over addition and there are two elements 0 and 1
(the set of all rational numbers is a field)

[n] a region in which active military operations are in progress
(the army was in the field awaiting action he served in the Vietnam theater for three years)

[n] all of the horses in a particular horse race

[n] all the competitors in a particular contest or sporting event

[n] a geographic region (land or sea) under which something valuable is found
(the diamond fields of South Africa)

[n] (computer science) a set of one or more adjacent characters comprising a unit of information

[n] the area that is visible (as through an optical instrument)

[n] a place where planes take off and land

Other vocabulary

f, f clef, f layer, f number, f region, f. d. roosevelt, f. g. banting, f. scott fitzgerald, f.i.s.c., fa, fa la, faa, fab, fabaceae, faberge, fabian, fabian society, fabiana, fabiana imbricata, fabianism, fable, fabled, fabric, fabricate, fabricated, fabrication, fabricator, fabulist, fabulous, fabulously, i, i chronicles, i corinthians, i esdra, i john, i kings, i maccabees, i peter, i samuel, i thessalonians, i timothy, i-beam, i. a. richards, i. f. stone, i. m. pei, i.d., i.e., i.e.d., i.q., i.w.w., ia, iaa, iaea, iago, iamb, iambic, iambus, ian douglas smith, ian fleming, ian lancaster fleming

Dictionary

A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by consonantal root for Semitic languages or radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies, pronunciations, translation, etc. It is a lexicographical reference that shows inter-relationships among the data.

A broad distinction is made between general and specialized dictionaries. Specialized dictionaries include words in specialist fields, rather than a complete range of words in the language. Lexical items that describe concepts in specific fields are usually called terms instead of words, although there is no consensus whether lexicology and terminology are two different fields of study. In theory, general dictionaries are supposed[citation needed] to be semasiological, mapping word to definition, while specialized dictionaries are supposed to be onomasiological, first identifying concepts and then establishing the terms used to designate them. In practice, the two approaches are used for both types. There are other types of dictionaries that do not fit neatly into the above distinction, for instance bilingual (translation) dictionaries, dictionaries of synonyms (thesauri), and rhyming dictionaries. The word dictionary (unqualified) is usually understood to refer to a general purpose monolingual dictionary.

There is also a contrast between prescriptive or descriptive dictionaries; the former reflect what is seen as correct use of the language while the latter reflect recorded actual use. Stylistic indications (e.g. "informal" or "vulgar") in many modern dictionaries are also considered by some to be less than objectively descriptive.

The first recorded dictionaries date back to Sumerian times around 2300 BCE, in the form of bilingual dictionaries, and the oldest surviving monolingual dictionaries are Chinese dictionaries c. 3rd century BCE. The first purely English alphabetical dictionary was A Table Alphabeticall, written in 1604, and monolingual dictionaries in other languages also began appearing in Europe at around this time. The systematic study of dictionaries as objects of scientific interest arose as a 20th-century enterprise, called lexicography, and largely initiated by Ladislav Zgusta. The birth of the new discipline was not without controversy, with the practical dictionary-makers being sometimes accused by others of having an "astonishing" lack of method and critical-self reflection.