information

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English

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Etymology

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From Middle English informacion, enformacion, borrowed from Anglo-Norman informacioun, enformation, Old French information, from Latin īnfōrmātiō (formation, conception; education), from the participle stem of īnformāre (to inform).

Pronunciation

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Noun

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information (usually uncountable, plural informations)

  1. That which resolves uncertainty; anything that answers the question of "what a given entity is".
  2. Things that are or can be known about a given topic; communicable knowledge of something. [from 14th c.]
    I need some more information about this issue.
  3. The act of informing or imparting knowledge; notification. [from 14th c.]
    For your information, I did this because I wanted to.
  4. (law, countable) A statement of criminal activity brought before a judge or magistrate; in the UK, used to inform a magistrate of an offence and request a warrant; in the US, an accusation brought before a judge without a grand jury indictment. [from 15th c.]
    • 1968, Carl B. Cone, The English Jacobins, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, page 131:
      On May 21, 1792, the Attorney General filed an information against Paine charging him with seditious libel.
  5. (obsolete) The act of informing against someone, passing on incriminating knowledge; accusation. [14th–17th c.]
  6. (now rare) The systematic imparting of knowledge; education, training. [from 14th c.]
  7. (now rare) The creation of form; the imparting of a given quality or characteristic; forming, animation. [from 17th c.]
  8. (computing, formally) […] the meaning that a human assigns to data by means of the known conventions used in its representation.
  9. (Christianity) Divine inspiration. [from 15th c.]
  10. A service provided by telephone which provides listed telephone numbers of a subscriber. [from 20th c.]
  11. (information theory) Any unambiguous abstract data, the smallest possible unit being the bit. [from 20th c.]
  12. As contrasted with data, information is processed to extract relevant data. [from late 20th c.]
  13. (information technology) Any ordered sequence of symbols (or signals) (that could contain a message). [from late 20th c.]

Usage notes

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  • The definition of information in the computing context is from an international standard vocabulary which, though formally accepted, is largely ignored by the computing profession.[1]

Hyponyms

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Derived terms

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English terms starting with “information”

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Compound words and expressions

Translations

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See also

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References

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  1. ^ W. N. Holmes (2001-05) “The Great Term Robbery”, in Computer[1], volume 34, number 5, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 94–96

Further reading

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Danish

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Danish Wikipedia has an article on:
Wikipedia da

Etymology

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Borrowed from Latin informatiō, informatiōnis.

Noun

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information c (singular definite informationen, plural indefinite informationer)

  1. (a piece of) information

Inflection

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Derived terms

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French

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Etymology

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Inherited from Old French, borrowed from Latin īnfōrmātiōnem.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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information f (plural informations)

  1. (countable) piece of information; datum
    Cette information nous est parvenue hier soir.
    This piece of information reached us last night.
  2. (plural only) news
    Tous les jours, il regarde la télé le midi pour suivre les informations.
    Every day, he watches TV at noon to catch the news.
  3. (uncountable) information
    Théorie de l’information.
    Theory of information

Synonyms

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Derived terms

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Further reading

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Swedish

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Etymology

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Borrowed from Latin informatiō, informatiōnis.

Pronunciation

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Noun

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information c

  1. information

Declension

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References

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