architecture

American  

[ahr-ki-tek-cher] / ˈɑr kɪˌtɛk tʃər /

noun

1. the profession of designing buildings, open areas, communities, and other artificial constructions and environments, usually with some regard to aesthetic effect. Architecture often includes design or selection of furnishings and decorations, supervision of construction work, and the examination, restoration, or remodeling of existing buildings.

2. the character or style of building.

   the architecture of Paris; Romanesque architecture.

3. the action or process of building; construction.

4. the result or product of architectural work, as a building.

5. buildings collectively.

6. Computers. a fundamental underlying design of computer hardware, software, or both.

7. the structure of anything.

   the architecture of a novel.

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architecture British  

/ ˈɑːkɪˌtɛktʃə /

noun

1. the art and science of designing and superintending the erection of buildings and similar structures

2. a style of building or structure

   Gothic architecture

3. buildings or structures collectively

4. the structure or design of anything

   the architecture of the universe

5. the internal organization of a computer's components with particular reference to the way in which data is transmitted

6. the arrangement of the various devices in a complete computer system or network

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Other Word Forms

• architectural adjective
• architecturally adverb

Etymology

Origin of architecture

First recorded in 1555–65; from Middle French, from Latin architectūra; architect, -ure

Example Sentences

Li said the company doubled the number of graphics-processing units that it used to train its ad-ranking model in the fourth quarter and adopted a new learning architecture.

From The Wall Street Journal

The team built their system using a 3D U-Net architecture, a type of convolutional neural network commonly used in scientific and medical image analysis.

From Science Daily

This isn’t a failure of leadership; it is a failure of architecture.

From The Wall Street Journal

Rather than outright replacing classical machines, quantum systems will likely be built on top of existing architecture to enable more powerful computations.

From Barron's

In software teams, engineers now specialize in system architecture, model integration, and quality control—roles that expand as routine coding becomes automated.

From The Wall Street Journal

Related Words

• building
• construction
• engineering
• planning