ARTIFICIAL • E-FREE TRANSLATION.COM • Definition of Artificial

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/ˌɑrtəfˈɪʃəl/ Listen

adjective

Artificial adj.

1.

Made or contrived by art; produced or modified by human skill and labor, in opposition to natural; as, artificial heat or light, gems, salts, minerals, fountains, flowers. "Artificial strife Lives in these touches, livelier than life."

2.

Feigned; fictitious; assumed; affected; not genuine. "Artificial tears."

3.

Artful; cunning; crafty. (Obs.)

4.

Cultivated; not indigenous; not of spontaneous growth; as, artificial grasses.

Artificial arguments (Rhet.), arguments invented by the speaker, in distinction from laws, authorities, and the like, which are called inartificial arguments or proofs.

Artificial classification (Science), an arrangement based on superficial characters, and not expressing the true natural relations species; as, "the artificial system" in botany, which is the same as the Linnaean system.

Artificial horizon. See under Horizon.

Artificial light, any light other than that which proceeds from the heavenly bodies.

Artificial lines, lines on a sector or scale, so contrived as to represent the logarithmic sines and tangents, which, by the help of the line of numbers, solve, with tolerable exactness, questions in trigonometry, navigation, etc.

Artificial numbers, logarithms.

Artificial person (Law). See under Person.

Artificial sines, Artificial tangents, etc., the same as logarithms of the natural sines, tangents, etc.

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Etymology of 'Artificial'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Artificial" Quotes from Famous Books

... and ablest, but after it becomes a caste, the individuals are selected on account of hereditary social position and not primarily on account of ability. Now biological experiments show that although artificial selection may be carried to a point where animals will breed true to a characteristic to within 90 per cent, yet if selection is stopped, and the descendants of the selected individuals are allowed to breed freely among themselves, they will in a very few ...

— Consanguineous Marriages in the American Population • George B. Louis Arner

... chimney of the mansion-house was the centre from which all the artificial features of the scene appeared to flow. The roofs, the gables, the dormer-windows, the porches, the clustered offices in the rear, all seemed to crowd about the great chimney. To this central pillar the paths all converged. The single poplar behind ...

— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 31, May, 1860 • Various

... were with all they saw, the Spaniards still bitterly complained that they found no signs of riches among the natives. Nature abundantly supplying all they required, they were without even a knowledge of artificial wants, and so unbounded was their hospitality, that they were ready to bestow everything they possessed on their guests. The fertile earth producing all they required, they preferred to live in that Arcadian state of simplicity which poets have delighted to picture. Their fields and gardens ...

— Notable Voyagers - From Columbus to Nordenskiold • W.H.G. Kingston and Henry Frith

... strongly impregnated with carbonate of lime that by their deposit of travertine they tend to block their own channel. The drainage of Rosea has, therefore, always been a matter of concern to the live stock industry of Reate, and in B.C. 272 M. Curius Dentatus opened the first of several successful artificial canals (the last dating from the sixteenth century, A.D.), which still serve to lead the Velinus into the Nar at the renowned Cascate delle Marmore. For two hundred years the people of Interamna (the modern Terni) ...

— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... and by enjoyment, onward they go; a secret mysterious instinct keeps them together, as if they had a king over them. They move along the floor in so strange an order that they seem to be a tessellated pavement themselves, and to be the artificial embellishment of the place; so true are their lines, and so perfect is the pattern they describe. Onward they go, to the market, to the temple sacrifices, to the bakers' stores, to the cookshops, to the confectioners, to the druggists; nothing comes amiss to them; wherever man has ...

— The Ontario Readers: The High School Reader, 1886 • Ministry of Education

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