Noun

(uncountable) The quality of being organized.

* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-03, volume=408, issue=8847, magazine=(The Economist)

, title= The machine of a new soul , passage=The yawning gap in neuroscientists’ understanding of their topic is in the intermediate scale of the brain’s anatomy. Science has a passable knowledge of how individual nerve cells, known as neurons, work. It also knows which visible lobes and ganglia of the brain do what. But how the neurons are organised in these lobes and ganglia remains obscure. Yet this is the level of organisation that does the actual thinking—and is, presumably, the seat of consciousness.}}

(uncountable) The way in which something is organized, such as a book or an article.

(countable) A group of people or other legal entities with an explicit purpose and written rules.

(countable) A group of people consciously cooperating.

(baseball) A major league club and all its farm teams.

Noun

(en noun)

A part, portion, or subdivision.

A distinct course of life, action, study, or the like.

* {{quote-news, year=2014

, date=November 14 , author=Stephen Halliday , title=Scotland 1-0 Republic of Ireland: Maloney the hero , work=The Scotsman citation , page= , passage=Flair and invention were very much at a premium, suffocated by the relentless pace and often fractious nature of proceedings. The absence of James Morrison from the centre of Scotland’s midfield, the West Brom man ruled out on the morning of the game by illness, had already diminished the creative capacity of the home side in that department .}}

* (and other bibliographic particulars), (Thomas Babington Macaulay)

A subdivision of an organization.

# One of the principal divisions of executive government

the Treasury Department'''''; ''the '''Department''' of Agriculture''; ''police '''department

# One of the divisions of instructions

the physics department'''''; ''the gender studies '''department

A territorial division; a district; especially, in France, one of the districts composed of several arrondissements into which the country is divided for governmental purposes.

* 2002 , , The Great Nation: France from Louis XV to the 1715-99 , Penguin 2003, p. 427:

The departments were the bricks from which the edifice of the nation was to be constructed.

(label) A military subdivision of a country; as, the Department of the Potomac.

(label) Act of departing; departure.

* (and other bibliographic particulars), Wotton

sudden 'departments from one extreme to another