Noun

(lb) The act of instructing, teaching, or furnishing with information or knowledge.

:

:

*{{quote-book, year=1927, author= F. E. Penny

, chapter=5, title= Pulling the Strings , passage=Anstruther laughed good-naturedly. “[…] I shall take out half a dozen intelligent maistries from our Press and get them to give our villagers instruction when they begin work and when they are in the fields.”}}

(lb) An instance of the information or knowledge so furnished.

*(William Shakespeare) (1564-1616)

*:If my instructions may be your guide.

(lb) An order or command.

*

*:Thus, when he drew up instructions in lawyer language, he expressed the important words by an initial, a medial, or a final consonant, and made scratches for all the words between; his clerks, however, understood him very well.

(lb) A single operation of a processor defined by an instruction set architecture.

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."