feature

English

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feature

Wikipedia

Etymology

From Middle English feture, from Anglo-Norman feture, from Old French faiture, from Latin factūra, from Latin factus, from Latin faciō (“do, make”), ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *dʰeh₁- (“to put, place, set”). Doublet of facture.

Pronunciation

• (Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ˈfiː.t͡ʃə(ɹ)/
• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈfi.t͡ʃɚ/

  • Audio (US)

    (file)

• Rhymes: -iːtʃə(ɹ)

Noun

feature (plural features)

1. (obsolete) One's structure or make-up: form, shape, bodily proportions.
   • 1596, Edmund Spenser, “Book IV, Canto II”, in The Faerie Queene. , London: [John Wolfe] for William Ponsonbie, →OCLC:

     all the powres of nature, / Which she by art could vse vnto her will, / And to her seruice bind each liuing creature; / Through secret vnderstanding of their feature.

2. An important or main item.
3. (media) A long, prominent article or item in the media, or the department that creates them; frequently used technically to distinguish content from news.
   • 1984 April 7, Warren Blumenfeld, “Boston's Other Voice”, in Gay Community News, page 8:

     A feature interview with a noted personality or a discussion covering a specific issue is then presented.

   1. (film) Ellipsis of feature film.
4. Any of the physical constituents of the face (eyes, nose, etc.).
5. (computing) A beneficial capability of a piece of software.
   • 2002, Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom:

     The program contained an internal feature, which allowed a user to update display text after each command keystroke.

6. The cast or structure of anything, or of any part of a thing, as of a landscape, a picture, a treaty, or an essay; any marked peculiarity or characteristic.

   Synonyms: see Thesaurus:characteristic

   one of the features of the landscape

   • 1911, 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica:

     The most prominent feature of the New England land system was the town grant, which in every case became the territorial basis of a group settlement.

   • 2007, Annette L. Juliano, “Niche with Amitabha Buddha and two Guanyin (Skt. Avalokiteshvara) Bodhisattvas [龛式阿弥陀佛和二观音菩萨造像]”, in Buddhist Sculpture from China: Selections from the Xi’an Beilin Museum: Fifth through Ninth Centuries‎, New York: China Institute, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 100, column 1:

     Another recently discovered cave temple site, Shizikou in Linyou County, Shaanxi, preserves sculptures with thin legs, particularly bodhisattvas, that are much taller and more slender than the figures of this niche but share a number of stylistic features, including a diagonal chest shawl and a dhoti with an overlapping apron of cloth that falls from the waist in the same two-part pattern of scalloped folds and a waist tie hanging down the middle; they have long tubular arms as well.

7. (archaeology) Something discerned from physical evidence that helps define, identify, characterize, and interpret an archeological site.

   A feature of many Central Texas prehistoric archeological sites is a low spreading pile of stones called a rock midden. Other features at these sites may include small hearths.

8. (engineering) Characteristic forms or shapes of parts. For example, a hole, boss, slot, cut, chamfer, or fillet.
9. (statistics, machine learning) An individual measurable property or characteristic of a phenomenon being observed; the input of a model.

   Coordinate term: (output) parameter

   • 2022 June 30, Adam Zewe, “Building explainability into the components of machine-learning models”, in MIT News‎:

     MIT researchers are striving to improve the interpretability of features so decision makers will be more comfortable using the outputs of machine-learning models. Drawing on years of field work, they developed a taxonomy to help developers craft features that will be easier for their target audience to understand.

10. (music) The act of being featured in a piece of music.
11. (linguistics) The elements into which linguistic units can be broken down.

    Hyponyms: gender, number, person, tense

Derived terms

Descendants

• → German: Feature

Translations

Verb

feature (third-person singular simple present features, present participle featuring, simple past and past participle featured)

1. (transitive) To ascribe the greatest importance to something within a certain context.
2. (transitive) To star, to contain.
   • 1990, Wayne Jancik, The Billboard Book of One-Hit Wonders, →ISBN, page 275:

     Whitfield wanted to put together a new act to feature his abilities.

3. (intransitive) To appear, to make an appearance.
   • 2009 November 27, “Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child has 'best guitar riff'”, in BBC‎:

     Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love, Deep Purple's Smoke On The Water and Layla by Derek and the Dominos also featured in the top five.

4. (transitive, dated) To have features resembling.
   • Sunday. Reading for the Young (page 219)

     More than his talents, Roger grudged him his looks, the brown eyes, golden hair, and oval face, which made people say how Johnny Weir featured his mother.

5. (Western Pennsylvania) To think about, understand, or imagine.

Translations

Further reading

• “feature”, in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, Springfield, Mass.: G. & C. Merriam, 1913, →OCLC.

Middle English

Noun

feature

1. Alternative form of feture