Noun

(en noun)

(literally)   The arrangement of support beams that represent a building's general shape and size.

(figuratively)   The larger branches of a tree that determine its shape.

(figuratively, especially in, computing)   A basic conceptual structure.

* {{quote-magazine, year=2012, month=March-April

, author=John T. Jost , title=Social Justice: Is It in Our Nature (and Our Future)? , volume=100, issue=2, page=162 , magazine=(American Scientist) citation , passage=He draws eclectically on studies of baboons, descriptive anthropological accounts of hunter-gatherer societies and, in a few cases, the fossil record. With this biological framework in place, Corning endeavors to show that the capitalist system as currently practiced in the United States and elsewhere is manifestly unfair.}}

These ‘three principles of connexion’ comprise the framework of principles in Hume's account of the association of ideas.

(literally)   The identification and categorisation of processes or steps that constitute a complex task or mindset in order to render explicit the tacit and implicit.

Noun

(-)

(computing) Encoded computer instructions, usually modifiable (unless stored in some form of unalterable memory such as ROM). Compare hardware.

* 1958 , John W. Tukey, "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" in The American Mathematical Monthly , vol. 65, no. 1 (Jan. 1958), pp 1-9:

The "software " comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its "hardware" of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.

* 1995 , Paul Niquette, Softword: Provenance for the Word ‘Software’ :

As originally conceived, the word "software " was merely an obvious way to distinguish a program from the computer itself. A program comprised sequences of changeable instructions each having the power to command the behavior of the permanently crafted machinery, the "hardware."