artifact

Meanings

1. An object made or shaped by human hand or labor.
2. An object made or shaped by some agent or intelligence, not necessarily of direct human origin.
3. Something viewed as a product of human agency or conception rather than an inherent element.
4. A finding or structure in an experiment or investigation that is not a true feature of the object under observation, but is a result of external action, the test arrangement, or an experimental error.
5. An object, such as a tool, ornament, or weapon of archaeological or historical interest, especially such an object found at an archaeological excavation.
6. An appearance or structure in protoplasm due to death, the method of preparation of specimens, or the use of reagents, and not present during life.
7. A perceptible distortion that appears in an audio or video file or an image as a result of applying a lossy compression or other inexact processing algorithm or of physical interference in an acquisition process.
8. Ellipsis of build artifact.
9. Any object in the collection of a museum. May be used sensu stricto only for human-made objects, or may include ones that are not human-made.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂er- Proto-Indo-European *h₂értis Proto-Italic *artis Latin ars Latin arte Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁k- Proto-Indo-European *-yéti Proto-Indo-European *dʰh₁kyéti Proto-Italic *θakjō Proto-Italic *fakjō Latin faciō Latin factum Vulgar Latin *artefactum Italian artefattoder. English artifact Alteration of artefact, from Italian artefatto, from Latin arte (“by skill”) (ablative of ars (“art”)) + factum (“thing made”) (from facio (“to make, do”)).

Translations