cultures

Noun

culture (countable and uncountable, plural cultures)

1. The arts, customs, lifestyles, background, and habits that characterize humankind, or a particular society or nation.
   • Castration of bulls was a socialization process that turned a bull into an ox; in this transformation something wild became something very useful; nature became culture.1981, William Irwin Thompson, The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality and the Origins of Culture, London: Rider/Hutchinson & Co., page 125
2. The beliefs, values, behaviour, and material objects that constitute a people's way of life.
   • I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and...1882, Matthew Arnold, “Sweetness and Light”, in Culture and Anarchy
3. The conventional conducts and ideologies of a community; the system comprising the accepted norms and values of a society.
   • Few concepts are as emotionally charged as that of race. The word conjures up a mixture of associations—culture, ethnicity, genetics, subjugation, exclusion and persecution.2012 March-April, Jan Sapp, “Race Finished”, in American Scientist, volume 100, number 2, archived from the original on 05 Sep 2015, page 164
4. Any knowledge passed from one generation to the next, not necessarily with respect to human beings.
5. Cultivation.
   • http://counties.cce.cornell.edu/suffolk/grownet/flowers/sprgbulb.htm
     The Culture of Spring-Flowering Bulbs
6. The process of growing a bacterial or other biological entity in an artificial medium.

See all 12 meanings of culture